Solution for online cheating?

Test-taking in online courses often leads to discussions about cheating and possible ways to minimize cheating. In some cases, proctored exams solve the problem, but that's not always a good solution for everyone and it may require that students pay money for the serverice. Course management systems may allow for randomly generated exams using a bank of questions, something which can minimize the kind of cheating where students share information about tests. Another way to address this is to use project-based learning techniques rather than multiple choice tests. This can help avoid the temptation to cheat, but it would still allow someone else to do the work for a student enrolled in an online course.

Apparently cheating on tests is a very big issue at Troy University in Alabama, home to 11,000 online students. They will soon require their online students to purchase the $125 security webcam made by Software Secure in order to monitor student work in online courses. The device includes a 360 degree webcam as well as other security features. It will record audio and video, so an instructor who suspects cheating will have a way to review a digital record. It seems like the presence of the device would be enough to discourage cheating, but many students still submit plagiarized papers through TurnItIn, so you never know what's going to happen. How long before hacks which allow you to disable the device are available online?

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

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