Coursera Turns to Student Honor Codes

Media reports have described how students are cheating in at least three Coursera classes. The charges came to light when students complained on course discussion boards about plagiarism, leading the massive online open course site to institute additional honor-code reminders students must read and sign off on before submitting assignments to be graded.

That development probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since student cheating is nothing new. In fact, a 2011 Pew survey found that 55% of college presidents responding to the poll said they'd seen a rise in plagiarism over the last 10 years and 89% of those presidents blamed it on Internet and online classes.

The real question is why bother to cheat at all since the class is free and the student doesn’t receive credit?

Torrie Bosch, editor of Future Tense, which covers emerging technologies for Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University, says she believes it has to do with the “gamification.” Some individuals are so driven to do better in everything, whether a game or an assignment, that they’ll turn to cheating when it becomes frustrating.

“Technically, using cheat codes while playing a game at home for fun or copy-pasting a couple of sentences from Wikipedia on a Coursera assignment doesn’t hurt anybody,” Bosch wrote. “But it does diminish the experience for those who are playing by the rules, as evidenced by the many Coursera students who took to their class discussion boards to complain when they uncovered instances of plagiarism.”

Education Tech Can't Leave Disabled Students Behind

The Department of Education estimates 11% of new college freshmen will arrive on campus with some sort of disability. That’s become a huge issue as institutions try to keep pace with technological changes while providing accessibility to all its students, whether they have vision or hearing problems to learning and cognitive disabilities.

State and federal legislators have stepped up with laws and regulations to provide equal access, and the industry is making progress. Blackboard claims its products meet industry standards and must gain approval from people with disabilities through partnerships with organizations such as the National Federation for the Blind before they ever reach the market.

But laws often have no teeth, according to Dianne Hengst, director of disability services at the University of Texas at San Antonio in a recent article that appeared at mysanantonio.com. Not only that, Hengst has also found students with disabilities do not always register with her office.

“(People with disabilities) don’t want to be segregated,” said Marti Hathorn, a blind graduate of UTSA and assistive technology supervisor at the San Antonio Lighthouse for the Blind. “We don’t want our own computer lab. I didn’t want to be left out of anything or cut corners. I wasn’t (in school) to get by, I wanted to do better than everyone else.”

Assistive technology could be as simple as curbs with handicap ramps and speech recognition software to more controversial ideas such as cochlear implants for children. For Hathorn, it included a screen magnifier, a closed-circuit television, and a scanner for her textbooks.

“When computer usage first took off, accessibility wasn’t even brought to the table,” she said. “Now it is starting to be a priority and is part of the discussion and more people with disabilities are speaking up.”

Students Ready for More Tech in the Classroom

The latest CDW-G student survey on education technology found just 23% of those polled were satisfied with the way instructors use class time. Those who were satisfied tended to listen to fewer lectures and use technology more.

“I do learn more with a mixed style, where the class is opened up to group discussion,” said Hannah Davis, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was part of a student panel during the Learn Now, Lecture Later: The New College Experience session at the Campus Technology 2012 conference in Boston.

The report surveyed 1,015 students, faculty, and IT staff at the high school and college level last May and June. Technology is employed more in college classrooms than high school, with 74% of college students using digital content, 55% making use of smartphones, and 53% taking advantage of recorded lectures.

“I like having the lecture online, so I can pause it and rewind,” said panelist Mario Solorzano, a student at Arizona State University. He told of an English professor at ASU who uses Skype to connect with students after office hours and of a grad student who created a Facebook study group.

In addition to greater opportunities to use technology in the classroom, students say they would like to see digital formats become standardized and the price of e-books come down.

“I find e-books priced much the same as textbooks and can’t bring myself to buy it for the same price as a hardcover, even though I would find them beneficial,” said Tyler Hughes, a student at the University of Michigan.

There are plenty of other challenges for IT and faculty to work out. Andy Lausch, vice president of higher education at CDW-G and moderator of the student-panel session, pointed to budget constraints, class size, and time for professional development as the biggest obstacles. Another hurdle could be faculty mindset, since the survey also found that 88% of respondents view moving away from traditional lectures as a challenge.

“Students say classroom time is moving in the right direction, but they want a greater mix of learning models, with more hands-on assignments and more virtual learning,” said Lausch. 

Has 'Innovation' Become a Mindless Buzzword?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article in May suggesting that the term “innovation” has been overused to the point of being cliché. The report showed the word was used 33,528 times in Security and Exchange Commission filings, an increase of 64% over the last five years, and that Amazon.com had 250 books released between February and May 2012 with the work “innovation” in the title.

It’s a subject Jason Tomassini of Education Week has been thinking about for a while. Tomassini followed up a blog on the influx of “innovation officers” in education by gathering responses he received from people who write about and study educational practices on his first post and the WSJarticle.

“It’s not that our education system doesn’t desperately need to be shaken up. But as the WSJ article makes clear, we are applying these adjectives without any analysis, without any reference to history,” wrote Audrey Watters, an education technology writer and blogger for Hack Education. “It’s just marketing schtick and sloppy thinking—and I think that’s both disappointing and dangerous when we want to see substantive change in education and are stuck instead with seeing the mediocre and the mundane touted as transformative.”

TED to the Rescue

TED (technology, entertainment, design) is coming to the aid of teachers who want to use the educational resources on YouTube in their classrooms. TED, a nonprofit organization that promotes ideas through conferences and free online video, has developed a web site that helps instructors find educational videos and provides a tool for “flipping” them.

“Flipping” refers to a blended learning method that makes use of technology to allow instructors more time to interact with students rather than lecture. Students are encouraged to move around the room, helping each other, while teacher-created videos keep the lesson going outside the classroom.

The new site, the second part of an effort called TED-Ed, is a portal that organizes the videos by themes and tags them to traditional subjects taught in school. The site also offers additional material, including multiple-choice questions, open-answer questions, and links to more information.

The site allows instructors to “flip” the videos, or edit them in a way that customizes the lesson. Each flipped video creates a web link for the instructor to distribute the lesson and track student answers.

There’s also a special tool that allows teachers to create a lesson from any video on YouTube that permits third-party embedding. These enhanced videos can be offered for wider distribution and the best will be featured on the TED-Ed site.

“We didn’t want to limit what people might want to use to teach,” Long Smalley, TED-Ed director, said in an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Perceptive Computers and Educational Technology

Adaptive software capable of "theory of the mind" intelligence was the topic of a recent keynot at the International Society for Technology in Education. As reported in Education Week, the keynote by molecular biologist John Medina proposed applications that could "be capable of involuntarily detecting student confusion, determining what the student's learning gap is and adjusting instruction accordingly. This could be done both by analyzing student work in a program, but also by computer recognition of facial expressions and physical behaviors."

Medina also questioned the ethical or cultural implications of such technology where the computer could detect whether a student is bewildered or inspired, or if an individual has innate ability for things like teaching. Self-paced learning and comparable technologies are already under development in the digital course materials space, and adaptive learning is almost certain to be an important part of the digital learning landscape by the end of this decade. The question, Medina posed, is whether the use of such technology could be used to harm as much as help students in the future.

Research Shows Strong Support for Educational Technology

A Clarus Research Group survey commissioned by Cisco shows that most educational leaders worldwide support technology in education. The study interviewed administrators and IT decision-makers in 14 countries.

The research revealed that the majority see the potential in technology addressing student concerns, such as employment prospects, distance education, and research capabilities. In the study, 86% of respondents agreed there was a need for programs to develop teamwork skills among students, while 85% believe the role of technology in student participation is increasing.

In addition, 83% consider technology important in preparing students for employment in a global economy and that it must be incorporated into curriculum. While most respondents see technology as a way to reduce cost, the majority also list online security as a main concern.