by Dr Davis on December 9, 2009
I am teaching my first online course next semester. I am a bit nervous about it, but this article by Daniel Willingham gives me some encouragement.
The chief drawback of online schooling was equally obvious to me: The teacher-student relationship, funneled through an Internet connection, would necessarily suffer. How could a teacher really get to know students when all of the interactions were via email and webcams?
That disadvantage was obvious to me until I mentioned it, in passing, to a friend who is an online teacher. Her experience was the just the opposite. She felt that she knew her students better in an online environment than she had in a bricks-and-mortar school.
I was intrigued enough that I tracked down five other online teachers at different grade levels, all of whom had taught in traditional schools. They all reported the same feelings.
Once they explained the reasons, it seemed not only plausible, but obvious.
by Dr Davis on December 9, 2009
I had several students plagiarize on papers and one student plagiarized not only his paper but two extra credit assignments.
My husband argued with me over the definition of plagiarism (He does not think missing citations are serious.) and was upset enough to not want to continue the discussion.
This article, which came to me via NCTE, appears to agree.
In his essay “Beating the House: How Inadequate Penalties for Cheating
Make Plagiarism an Excellent Gamble,” Matthew Woessner calculates that plagiarism is a strategy likely to pay off: “when expected value functions indicate that engaging in plagiarism will (in all probability) raise a student’s grade and save her time, assuming the risk of misconduct must be described as rational” (314). Students’ and instructors’—and later, employers’—fixation upon grades inhibits understanding and ameliorating the systemic, contextual nature of the problem. But once one acknowledges, as Woessner does, that a context of evaluation invites academic dishonesty, then it cannot follow that the solution is aggressive punishment of that dishonesty. Yet this is exactly what Woessner, and many others, recommend: “all but the most aggressive plagiarism sanctions inadvertently reward students who elect to engage in this type of misconduct” (313).
The author argues that paying attention to grades limits integrity. I do not think this is true. Grades are always important. In my seventh grade social studies class, when the teacher was out, all but one student cheated on the exam. I reported them and I was also penalized. Were those students, most of whom were from the inner city, really worried about their grades? Or did they think that an easy A would be fun?
The article also says:
This belief helps explain the actions of both students and teachers around the issue of academic dishonesty. If this student were to study successfully, he might get an A on the exam; but if he were to cheat successfully, he would have a better chance of getting an A because cheating mitigates the randomness of the outcome—it eliminates the personal factor and puts the student more firmly in control.
Does that make any sense? Cheating is less random. I suppose it somewhat is true for a test, but how is cheating on a paper, which is the topic of the discussion, less random that actually doing the paper?
I totally disagree with this article, but it is an interesting one to look at because it is a different perspective.
by Dr Davis on December 9, 2009
Kevin Brown, in a Chronicle article, talks about some of them. I have, indeed, found these to be true, though I have also been part of a SLAC where the departments were funded separately and competition was fierce.
The specific section I am responding to with that comment is:
Professors at research universities tend to see their departments as the defining aspect of their employment at the institution, fending off space and financial concerns from other departments, while we tend to see the university as a whole, with subgroups within it that help shape us, but do not define us, per se.
