I received an interesting email from one of my online students that made me think about the medium of online education. We as faculty are all experts in our respective disciplines. Most of us mastered our discipline in a traditional face to face classroom. And most of us try to replicate how we learned in those classrooms. However, very few of us have taken an online class and our thought process is very different from those of our students in an online class. What they view as acceptable way of learning. Their views may or may not be mistaken, however half of reality is perception and the medium of communication creates perceptions.
Ease of use creates the false perception that "this material must be accurate" explaining the popularity and acceptance of the content in Wikipedia.
What we the faculty were trained in a traditional classroom to consider as cheating is not considered cheating by students in an online class.
The following is a portion of the email that got me thinking:
Hi, Mr. Javanmard, I took the Quiz, and found this question, I probably spent half an hour trying to answer it, and I gave up and just chose an answer, I was curious so I also posted it on Yahoo Answers, I recently received an answer and the people told me the answer is none of the above, can you explain to me the correct answer, because everyone I contacted couldn't answer it
Please notice:
First the student considers half an hour as a very long time. In the world of instant gratification of online half an hour is an eternity.
Second, the student did not see anything wrong with posting the question on Yahoo answers. This point made me suspicious and I spoke to some students and found out that most test questions can be found on popular search engines. So a student sits down at a computer. Enters the question into a search engine and answers the question. Another way is for a group of students to take turns taking quizzes and sharing the correct answers with others in person or over Social Media sites. The second method does not work in my classes because I do not release the correct answers till the day after the due date.
This made wonder is this the fault of the technology or is this the fault of educators who advocate Cooperative Learning? These students are extremely cooperative. They take turn sacrificing their score on small quizzes to help the team. This is exact behavior that is encouraged in cooperative cultures of Asia and the U.S. Army Infantry (the team above one self).
