War on Plagiarism (Part II): How do you know who's on the other side of your online course?

In his classic 1999 book Code and Other Cyberspace Laws, Professor Lawrence Lessig explained, “Real-space life… carries with it this mix of authenticating and authenticated credentials. Social life is a constant negotiation between these different credentials. In a small town, in a quieter time, documents as credentials were not terribly necessary. You were known by your face, and your face carried with it a reference… about your character. As life becomes more anonymous, social institutions must construct credentials to authenticate facts about you that in an earlier time, or in a smaller social world, would have been authenticated by the knowledge of the community about who you are.” Since Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote those words, online education has come of age. According to a 2008 report called "Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States," published by the Sloan-C, a consortium that promotes online education, from 2002 to 2007, enrollment in online courses grew 19.7 percent. This can be compared with the 1.5-percent growth in the total college-student population. The study also discovered that more than 20 percent of American college students had taken at least one online course during their fall 2007 semester. This growth has brought the issue of student ID verification out onto higher education’s front burner. Perhaps not anticipating this, Lessig’s book focused on the needs of the financial and retail industries, where the vendor and the customer share a strong interest in authenticated identity. That the seller correctly identifies the buyer is crucial to Internet commerce. Online learning, says Michael Jortberg, Higher Education Industry Leader at Acxiom, “poses the exact same problem… only different.” He explains that ours is the only industry in which the customer may be motivated to mislead the seller about his actual identity. Since our customers may be more interested in buying a credential than in purchasing our principal product --- knowledge --- a significant percentage of them are likely to cheat. How serious is the problem of cheating in higher education assessment of learning? A 2008 U.S. News & World Report study found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating at least once. Fifty-four percent of engineering students and 45 percent of law students made the same admission. By contrast, a study authored in September of this year by three faculty at Friends University, “Point, Click, Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom,” [http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall123/stuber123.html] concludes, “Results suggest that the amount of academic misconduct among online students may not be as prevalent as believed.” If this is so, it may be because most online providers appear to take cheating very, very seriously. For instance, Don Kassner, president of Andrew Jackson University, founded in 1995 as a correspondence school and now 100 percent online, says, “We used to proctor every exam.” The problems with this approach, he adds, include high cost and student inconvenience. “Students,” he explains, “would complain that ‘I can do all the course work at my kitchen table, but then I have to go somewhere else to take the tests.” The drawbacks of proctoring are exacerbated when curricula are delivered globally. Recalls Larry Dugan, Director of Online Learning at Finger Lakes Community College, “We give tests all over the world. Let’s say I needed a proctor for an exam in Tokyo. I’d have to identify and hire that person. If I put it on the faculty, they wouldn’t do right. And it was very expensive.” Clearly, if online learning was to grow and prosper, face-to-face proctoring had to be replaced. Axciom offers one very intriguing solution. When a client’s students sit down at the keyboard to take a test, they are hit with a series of “challenge questions” in quick succession. If they know the answers, they are permitted o proceed with the assessment exercise. The questions come from a database developed and maintained by Mike Jortberg’s unit, which gathers public information from the Worldwide Web. “Typically we pose three random challenges and give them two minutes to answer.” Does it ever happen that your system produces incorrect information, I ask him. This happens occasionally, he allows. For example, “A student in Dallas a few weeks ago answered all the challenge questions correctly, then told us that all the information was wrong. He explained, ‘My identity was stolen. I recognize the thieves’ data.’ He passed the challenge 100 percent.” This cautionary tale begs the question of legal liability. One client of Jortberg’s product, Dr. Jeff Bailey, formerly with National American University, says, “We told students what was going on up front. We told them this is a reasonable alternative to proctoring and you can opt out. No one opted out and we had no complaints.” A click-to-accept agreement, that includes acquiescence the “challenge question” component, is a common safeguard incorporated by Jortberg’s customers. Although none of the Acxiom clients I talked to reported any legal hassles with the “challenge question” approach, some are not satisfied with exclusive reliance on this methodology. Don Kassner says, “We combined the Axciom product with webcam.” In fact, he tells me, Andrew Jackson combines three techniques to monitor the midterms and final exams, which are the only assessment tools for most of the university’s courses. • First, the faculty member administering the exam is able to see and hear the student. A photo is on record for comparison’s sake. • Second, the student is hit with the “challenge questions.’ • And, third, the teacher is able to see what the student is seeing on the computer screen. “The student can’t bounce to Google and look up an answer.” Andrew Jackson’s one-two-three punch may be the state-of-the-art in online verification at this writing, but the next generation of identification technologies is already in use in the financial and retail sectors. Observes Dr. Tim McGee, a faculty-development specialist based on the East Coast, “We’re still in a medieval structure. We’re not using 21st century technologies.” He cites a simple example. “At my local grocery store, employees punch in and out by palm identification.” He predicts, “The next generation of built-in computer cameras will be able to do iris IDs.” Even if the online education industry were not leading the charge toward better and better student-verification methods, Uncle Sam would insist upon them. According to Mike Jortberg, “The issue of identity goes to Title IV dollars. How do we know the taxpayers’ money goes to the guys it’s supposed to?” The Higher Education Opportunity Act addresses this federal concern. By next summer, says the Department of Education, accreditors need to have figured out how their client institutions will address the issue. But, complains Jortberg, in the negotiated rulemaking process, “the industry convinced DOE that a user ID and password were sufficient.” He specifically points his finger at the Instructional Technology Council. ITC’s “Best Practice Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity in Online Education” [http://www.itcnetwork.org/file.php?file=%2F1%2FAcademicIntegrityBestPracticesColor.pdf] seems to support this claim. The seventh of its seven guidelines on "Institutional Context and Commitment" is " Secure student logins and password to access online courses and related resources, discussions, assignments and assessments." However, under the "Assessment and Evaluation" portion of the document, a nod is given to "Use [of] proctored test sites where appropriate."

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Whether or not the trade association exercised the influence Jortberg ascribes to it, DOE’s March 2009 “Proposed Regulatory Language” does state, “Accrediting agencies must require institutions that offer distance education or correspondence education to have processes in place to establish that the student who registers for a distance education or correspondence course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit. The conference report language on this provision makes clear that institutions should not use or rely on technologies that interfere with student privacy. However, the expectation is that institutions have security mechanisms in place, such as identification numbers, or other pass code information, that are used each time student participates in class time or coursework online.” However, in the same breath, the DOE document adds that the Congressional conference committee also “notes that as new identification technologies are developed, and become more sophisticated and less expensive, the conferees anticipate that agencies and institutions will consider their use in the future,” while once again insuring that students’ privacy interests are protected. When all is said and done, it seems ---at least to this writer --- that iris recognition presents the most promising prospect for a simple, foolproof method of online student identification. According to the website www.iris-recognition.org, “There is a growing number of iris recognition systems available in the market.” One vendor, LG Electronics, touts, “Of all the biometric technologies used for human authentication today, it is generally conceded that iris recognition is the most accurate. Coupling this high confidence authentication with factors like outlier group size, speed, usage/human factors, platform versatility and flexibility for use in identification or verification modes - as well as addressing issues like database size/management and privacy concerns - iris recognition has also shown itself to be exceedingly versatile and suited for large population applications.” Only one reported federal case deals with a challenge to iris recognition as an identification technique. In Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees v. Union Pacific Railroad, decided by the federal court for northern Iowa in 2007, the union sought to get an injunction against the use of this technique by the employer. In this case, the company tested the technology as a time-keeping technique. It reported to the court that not one member of System Rail Gang 9101, the guinea pigs, complained. All the same, their union launched its legal challenge. Holding that the practice was properly dealt with in collective bargaining the federal judge denied the union its requested injunction. Both European banks and the U.S. military in the Middle East are using iris recognition as this is written. Iris-recognition.org lists eight iris-recognition vendors, while LG Electronics boasts dozens of clients, including the Harvard Medical School. But despite these inroads, iris-recognition.org cautions that before Tim McGee’s prediction --- that this technology will soon be PC standard equipment --- much remains to be done. “On the one hand, existing approaches must be assessed with the help of public datasets… in terms of error rates, running times and the like. On the other hand, new approaches have to be found that enable iris recognition to be ubiquitous. The general acceptance of iris recognition and its ease of deployment in real-world scenarios has to be raised. Furthermore, iris recognition has to be related to other biometrics like face recognition, e.g. in the context of impostor detection or replay attack denial.” Meanwhile, Jeff Bailey, flexing to the DOE’s modest ID standard, shrugs, “People who cheat will always cheat.” Consequently, the best method, he suggests --- going contrary to Don Kassner’s belt, suspenders, and another belt --- is to have “multiple assessment points.” An online course should avoid a “big final that encourages cheating by its high stakes.” Thus, while which approach (if any) ultimately will dominate the online industry, a spectrum of choices --- from Bailey’s low-stakes multiple-assessment approach to McGee’s advocacy of iris recognition--- is dealing with “the difference” between online learning and all other Internet commerce.