Why the hottest trend in online education already has a cheating problem [View all]

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By JAMES LANG

In August of 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a story about a baffling phenomenon in the world of online higher education: students in a non-credit bearing MOOC (massive open online course) were cheating on the written assignments. The honest students complained about the plagiarized work they were seeing from their peers; in response the professor teaching the course gave a stern written lecture on academic dishonesty.

But the incident raised a question that educational theorists and cheating scholars have been puzzling over since: Why would a student cheat in a course in which they voluntarily enrolled, and for which they earn no tangible rewards? Jonathan Haber, a blogger documenting his efforts to earn the equivalent of a four-year college degree with a year’s worth of MOOCs, wrote that “during a period when MOOCs still carry uncertain external value, behaving dishonestly makes no practical sense (especially since students who can’t keep up with the work have other alternatives—such as simply dropping the course—an option that carries little to no social stigma).”

We should not jump too hastily to the conclusion that MOOCs carry no real stakes.

Composition theorist and plagiarism researcher Rebecca Moore Howard points out that stakes do in fact exist for some MOOCs, even if they do not come in the form of college credit: “There actually are stakes for students in non-credit-bearing MOOCs, in that Coursera and other proprietors actually connect successful students with prospective employers.”

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