Is distance education a new forum for acedemic dishonesty?
While all of these changes are taking place in education today, many people are becoming skeptical about the virtual university. With the dawn of the computer came the dawn of cut and paste plagiarism. Documents on the Internet can be plagiarized without the author or anyone knowing. Professors must no question the work produced by their students.
The Internet provided the environment for the growth of bogus information. Web pages can be constructed with malicious intent. Information can become outdated over night without any corrections on the pages containing this information. There have been few steps taken to ensure that web sites contain coherent correct information.
Many people view distance education as a menace to education itself. Many people believe that a new era of cheating will begin with this new application of computers. Along with cheating, other time consuming problems begin to show themselves. Murphy’s Law is defined as anything with the potential of going wrong will go wrong (Berger, 2). Students tell professors that there have been problems with the system. Is the student lying? Is the system malfunctioning? Since there are no concrete ways of being sure, many feel that distance education loses some of its credibility.
There are deadlines when there are assignments. Professors conducting distance education courses need a way to document the work of the student. Professors have dealt with the situation of not receiving work sent in by a student. The professor needs to trust the student until the problem is resolved. A student could have not completed an assignment and used this excuse to extend the time for the assignment (Berger, 2).
Another scenario that is common is technical ignorance. Students try to utilize computer programs to send work over the Internet. The work is sent via email as an attached file. Professors had difficulty in opening these attached files. Documenting authorship presents a problem. Email sent to a professor from an unknown location makes it difficult in determining the true author of a paper. (Berger, 3).
Grading distance education classes presents a problem of excessive uniqueness. If a class contains fifty distance education students, an essay test will have fifty different versions to correct. There is also the contingency of grading fifty attached files with the title of midterm.doc. These problems will take away from the benefits of distance education due to the extra time the professor needs to invest in sorting out the technical difficulties of his students (Daniel, 10).
Many people see distance education as a threat to the integrity of learning. There is nothing stopping students from copying another’s work from an email to meet a deadline. Many students will be able to avoid work by downloading something from the Internet. Virtual Universities will soon produce virtual diplomas. They will have no real substance to them because students have avoided learning by utilizing pirating techniques.
Many professors feel that virtual universities do not teach students as well as traditional modes of education. Professors involved with distance education at the University of Kentucky Community College. Professors said that the role of an instructor changes dramatically (Inman, 2). Professors feel that they are now a monitor of class material. Professors felt that they were losing their ability to teach. They found themselves augmenting information that was provided. The role as an educator was greatly diminished (Inman, 2).
Many professors indicated that there are weak channels of communication between the professor and student. The major weakness in distance education id the lack of interaction of the students with the professors and themselves. Students see the added convenience of distance education as sufficient compensation for the lack of interaction with the professor. Professors say that this is a major step backwards in the evolution of the education system (Kearsley, 56).