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Offering online courses makes financial sense for universities. It is also in the best financial interest of CCO to discourage substantial redesigns to courses because these would not only require additional funds for updating the content, but would also create a substantial amount of work for the full-time staff. So what we see here is a conflict of financial and pedagogical priorities. To further illustrate our pedagogical challenges, we present two case studies from our courses that emerged from our inability to properly socialize the students regarding proper academic behavior — proselytizing and plagiarism.

Blazer: In my course student interaction occurred in Blackboard forums. As part of my original course design, a major assignment for the course required weekly forum posts and at least one formal response to a classmate’s post. This weekly assignment was due by the end of the week and I graded them on Monday mornings.

In general, students are drawn to online classes because they allow flexible scheduling. In theory, this weekly assignment could have been completed at any time during the week, but in practice, the majority of posting took place between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am on Sunday evening/Monday morning — a time when it was understandably difficult for me to moderate or intervene in the discussion. Given this, it took substantially longer than my face-to-face classes to establish appropriate discussion practices. Particularly if a student has never had a religious studies class in college, that student may be unaware that it is inappropriate to quote the Bible as philosophical evidence or to respond to a classmate’s post with Christian theological statements such as “It doesn't matter. God has a plan.” or “God is real.” When these kinds of statements appeared, I intervened by posting in the discussion forum why such statements were inappropriate for our class. I referenced the introductory lecture that explicitly stated that the academic study of religion is not interested in proving theological truths but in investigating the multiple facets of theological debates. I would also send the student a personal e-mail stating that I would remove the student’s posts from the forum if they did not reflect academic rigor.

Since this activity was happening in the middle of the night, I never intervened as it was taking place and, as a result, it took substantially longer to establish the kind of respectful, tolerant classroom atmosphere that I have been able to cultivate relatively quickly in face-to-face teaching environments.

Denison: In my Fall 2010 course, I had similar problems establishing appropriate classroom behavior. In addition to persistent proselytizing, I had several instances of plagiarism. In the second week of class, I had a student cut and paste an article from Wikipedia as a forum response. Aside from the egregious violation of the university’s honor code, this caused problems in the class discussion. Students responding to the plagiarized post were confused by the tone of the post and became concerned that they were not doing the assignment correctly.  When I woke up on Monday morning, my inbox was full of questions about whether or not their posts needed to include historic information about the philosophers they had read and if they needed to do outside research. I handled this by directly contacting the offending student and letting them know that they had plagiarized and that their work would not receive credit. The student acknowledged the error and it didn’t happen again.

This could have resolved the issue, but the public nature of this case resulted in further complications. In a face-to-face course, this case of plagiarism would have remained a private interaction between me and the student. However, because of the nature of the online classroom, students were immediately alarmed by what they perceived to be the accurate way to write responses. I ended up responding to each of the e-mails individually, assuring the students that they had completed their responses correctly. In my weekly e-mail to the rest of the class, I reemphasized that they did not have to do outside research, and if they did, they needed to cite it correctly. However, due to the confidentiality related to grades, I did not “out” the controversial post as plagiarized. Unfortunately, after this incident, several other students also plagiarized their posts from other Internet sources.

In a face-to-face class, socialization towards writing and citing expectations can happen quickly. Through the tone of my voice and body language, I am able to convey the gravity of plagiarism effectively, even to students sitting in the back row. Furthermore, isolated instances of plagiarism remain private, protecting the student and shielding the student’s classmates from their example. An online class does not have the same advantage, as the course syllabus can contain information about plagiarism and tips on how to avoid it, but there is no guarantee that students will read it.



 

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