Whilst the hoopla surrounding MOOCs has subsided a touch in recent months, their impact is still a sizable one. Despite vast numbers enrolling on courses however, they still seem to be struggling to make an impact in the workplace. Few employers seem to grant any credence to courses undertaken ala MOOC.
Our ability to game the courses may be one reason for that. A recent study, from researchers at MIT and Harvard, highlights how it’s possible to cheat certain online courses.
“If learners in some online courses are circumventing the learning process and obtaining certification without going through the traditional routes of assessment and feedback, then the certification does not necessarily imply that they learned anything. This could seriously devalue MOOC certification,” the authors say. “This is a well-known issue in academics, and it’s happening in a new ways in online settings. We want to understand and address this issue as online education continues to grow.”
Cheating on a MOOC
The paper describes a kind of cheating that is particular to MOOCs, with the unique design features of the MOOC enabling it to happen. It involves the student creating multiple accounts, and potentially gaining certification for the course in as little as an hour.
The researchers collected data from the edX platform, and when it was analyzed they noticed that some students appeared to be answering the assessment questions ridiculously quickly. When this was analyzed further, it emerged that a number of the students employed a strategy that the authors referred to as “copying answers using multiple existences online” (or CAMEO).
What is CAMEO?
CAMEO sees the user create a number of accounts, with one of these the core account used to earn the certificate. The other accounts are then used to discover the right answer to the various assessment questions on each course.
When the researchers began to hunt down CAMEO users, they found that roughly 1.3 percent of the students on 69 courses had been using the strategy to obtain certificates.
What’s more, when they analyzed students who had obtained over 20 certificates, this number rocketed to 25 percent.
“This is not an isolated incident of copying on part of one assignment,” the authors say. “This is the wholesale falsification of a certificate.”
Such cheating was found to be highest in government, social science and health related courses, with the lowest numbers occurring on computer science courses.
How can it be stopped?
The paper provides a number of strategies that can be deployed to prevent this form of cheating. For instance, the answers to assessments could be delayed until after assignments are due, or the questions could be randomized so that no two students receive the same ones. The authors accept the challenges involved in implementing some of these strategies however.
They do contend however that more needs to be done by the platforms to counter the problem.
“One of the most interesting lessons from the paper is that there are ways to mitigate cheating that are straightforward and implementable by the teams creating online course content,” the authors say. “We also expect platform improvements, such as virtual proctoring, to help reduce cheating.”
It's inevitable that people would want to take short-cuts, as they do in most aspects of life. I'm not sure anyone really values a MOOC certificate anyway do they? Does it actually benefit anyone to claim they've completed loads of them?
This was very interesting. I first came across these MOOCs this year and the claim from the person telling me was that they still aren't as highly valued as something that costs money. Which is interesting really, because why must the cost imply the quality? But the fact that people are cheating in this way simply sets it back even further.
On a side note – it's a really smart way to cheat the system.
I can't see the point on cheating in something that has so little value. The worth of a MOOC comes in the knowledge you gain, not the certificate you receive.