Recently, five colleges were hit with financial aid fraud schemes.  At one, a teacher spotted a pattern of lack of engagement in one of their classes.  The college  IT department checked  out IP addresses finding them all leading to the same person.  (There was an article about this in the Chronicles last week.)

The Feds are taking the issue of financial aid fraud and student authentication up again and there is a really important post at WCET this morning about it.  (see below)

I think that  the California Community College OEI program at  Foothill and Butte Colleges, will, in their state wide efforts have to address this in the application and common assessment processes, but we need to be vigilant in our classes and our own processes in the meantime. 

So, as I see it there are three levels of defense that will have to be addressed: 
1. State-wide technology agencies will have to administer integrity checks at application;
2. Individual colleges will have to put in place any technology safeguards possible (the least of which is password refresh process for your CMS, if you don't have one.) and possibly, hire a service like Proctor-U.
3.  DE Teachers will have to use multiple measures of assessment (not high stakes tests), proctoring where ever possible (can be done remotely-put a process in place), talk to their students about what cheating, plagiarism, and financial fraud are (they get emails asking them "please don't drop me, I'll loose my financial aid!" all the time), and watch for patterns of disengagement.

This is going to be a huge issue and all of the colleges offering DE programs will need to stay on top of it.

The link to the information is at: http://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/financial-aid-fraud/

Student Integrity?  What's missing?

I've been thinking a great deal about the issues of student integrity in the online environment (and everywhere) lately.  It all started back in the fall of 2013, I gave a keynote presentation about the state of online learning in California. 

Before the presentation, I was sipping coffee with some of the teachers in the room and we were talking about our students and how they have changed over these past few years.  I originally had a whole presentation prepared about innovation and the like, but as I faced the teachers assembled waiting for my presentation, I changed my mind. 

Instead of starting with my planned presentation, I started with a question.  I asked those teachers how many had policies covering cheating and plagiarism on their course syllabi.  Almost all raised their hands.  I then asked how many had definitions as part of those policies and many hands went down.  My last question was how many had a discussion forum set up that gave students insight into why integrity was important to them, both to the student and the teacher.  Not a single hand remained in the air.

We so often jump to codify the infractions of cheating and plagiarism along with the strict consequences in our course policies.  We assume, even though we know that we are not correct, that our students understand what cheating, plagiarism, and financial aid fraud actually are.   Moreover, we assume that they both know when they are out of integrity with their work and know that it’s wrong to do! 

How many times have you received email from students asking you to not drop them for failing, because they will loose their financial aid?  This is a teachable moment!  Let them know they are committing fraud.  Obviously, they don’t know!  Are we having conversations with students about how important integrity is to us and why it should be to them?  Let’s work on that.

I think it is critically important that the teacher have that conversation with the student about not only defining what the problem is, but  also having a conversation that lets students know why it should be important to them and IS important to us that they be original in their work and their lives. 

The consequences of degrees that don't matter are huge for all of us, but the consequences for the student of being unprepared for life and work, is much more important to address.

Visit the wonderful blog post by Michelle Warn at WCET for some good information about strategies to cope with the problems of integrity in online environments.