16 May

SAT Tests Get Cancelled Massively...Because of Cheating

- Education Worldwide

SATs are standardized tests for college admissions that students in U.S. and worldwide must undertake in order to gain admittance to American schools, including prestigious Harvard and Stanford.

A SAT exam session scheduled for last May 4, for over 1.500 South-Korean students, had to be called out in the entire country by the US-based organization that organizes the tests (the Educational Testing Service - ETS), after finding out that tutoring companies in South Korea had illegally obtained the SAT test materials and leaked it to their students, at a cost about $4,575. This is far from being an isolated case; in 2011, several students were charged in a SAT cheating case in Long Island, NY.

Of the nearly three million SAT exams taken worldwide each year, at least a few thousand are cancelled because of suspected cheating. Several hundred other potential test takers are turned away at the door each year because of questionable identification.

The blame is not only on South Korea, in fact, American universities use – and sometimes misuse- their SAT scores as indicator of selectiveness of their enrolment process, to demonstrate the high capacity of their candidates. These cases just show the scope of this cheating phenomenon and why a whole new industry of proctoring is blossoming.

Read more:

See also:

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15 May

A MOOC-like Open Online Master Program, Free or Accredited at low-cost

- OpenEd & OER

Online Master program in Computer Science (OMS CS) was announced yesterday by Georgia Tech at two levels. Courses in the program will be free through Udacity’s site, made up of video lectures and computer-graded assignments. Students who want credit or a degree will have to apply for admission to the university and pay tuition; they will get access to teaching assistants and even, in some cases, have their assignments graded by people.

The fees put a top-ranked computer-science program at a price point comparable to a typical community college—about $134 per credit, compared with the normal rates at Georgia Tech of $472 per credit for in-state students and $1,139 per credit for out-of-state students. The program is expected to take most students three years to complete, and cost less than $7,000. The university and Udacity will split the revenue from the paying students, with 60 percent going to Georgia Tech and 40 percent to Udacity.

According to Mr.R. Bras, the university’s provost,  the program “is going to be as hard and at a level of excellence of a regular degree.” And students on the degree track will  take tests in person at one of 4,000 proctored testing centers run by Pearson VUE.

Here is the fact sheet released as Q&A: http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/faq/

Read full article:

http://chronicle.com/article/Ga-Tech-to-Offer-a-MOOC-Like/139245/

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10 May

A MOOC Moratorium at American University

- OpenEd & OER

On January 9, 2013, the provost at American University (AU), Scott A. Bass, issued a Memorandum to the deans regarding AU policy on MOOCs. After the April debate, sparked by the faculty members of San Jose State U, Amherst College and Duke U, the administration of AU decided to make its position more public and on March 8, 2013 sent the following statement to university faculty and staff to clarify the university’s “moratorium” on creating massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

How does it add to the debate launched by San Jose State? Both universities seem to be on the same “side of the barricade”, strongly opposing the rise of MOOCs. But in fact, a fundamental, long-standing issue, at the very heart of the university system, is brought into discussion: the issue of academic freedom and autonomy of faculty.

The two universities demonstrate quite different interpretation of it. In San Jose, the philosophy department is alarmed by the possible loss of influence in decision making process, prospects of diminishing their professorial status and job security; they also argued for student interests. In AU, Wash.D.C., the administration did not bring students into picture at all. No pedagogical or tech concerns raised, just the utilization of university resources (academic, human, financial) and total control of the faculty. The moratorium forbids any experimentation with online teaching, unless it does not violate one of the 7 “quidelines” for “permissible creative online activity“. In the meantime, the administration continues to draft a policy how the massive online courses would operate there: in institutional partnerships or freelance-based, when professors would teach MOOCs on their own – and bringing up new issues of representation, teaching time, working load, promotion, tenure.

Related articles:

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08 May

MOOCs for Teacher Professional Development Partnership

- OpenEd & OER

Most of recent news about developments of open online courses have been gloomy.   The black shadow of MOOCs started to crawl into technological innovation of any kind. Just to mention the title of an article in the Chronicle today: Scholars Sound the Alert From the ‘Dark Side’ of Tech Innovation. ( It is hardly worth of reading, though…It reports on the conference in Milwaukee, which was called “The Dark Side of the Digital” ).

 But this one is a good news. A first series of massive Teacher Professional Development (PD) courses will be launched  online on the Coursera platform this summer, free (no strings seem attached).
A dozen of leading schools of education, educational and cultural institutions joined Coursera for this ambitious project. In words of Gordon Brown, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education,
“Coursera’s ambitious agenda to take teacher training and professional development to scale using technology is an important and crucial innovation on the road to meeting our global education goals.”

(Check out the current list of courses.)

Keep reading here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/coursera-announces-professional-development-courses-041650832.html

and https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-04-30-coursera-charts-course-for-k-12
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07 May

MOOC Teaches How to Cheat in Online Courses, With Eye to Prevention

- OpenEd & OER

Cheating in online education remains a concern  for many instructors and institutions, with some universities hiring online-proctoring companies to monitor students through webcams. Others require students to take examinations at a physical testing site. Besides moral issues, both options are quite costly.

To respond to these concerns, Bernard Bull of Concordia University Wisconsin, will start next week a newly designed MOOC “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses”. After 2 years of research on cheating, focusing not on those who get caught but those who get away with it, Bull found that his views on cheating had begun to shift…

The course, with the cap of 1,000 participants, will run for 8 weeks on the Canvas MOOC platform, a course-management company developed by Instructure.

Read in full:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mooc-teaches-how-to-cheat-in-online-courses-with-eye-to-prevention/43699?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en