Serendipity35

So, there's a course on how to cheat online. But with the purpose of preventing cheating online. This course is a massive open online course titled “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is currently in progress on the Canvas (MOOC) Network platform.

Having taught a course in Canvas, I know that their offerings are more "big" than "massive" compared to ones from Coursera and others. Canvas courses are more in the 500 - 2000 range, where we know that other platforms often run courses closer to the 100K registration rate. This particular course had a cap of 1000 and quickly filled.

Bernard Bull, Assistant Vice President of Academics and Associate Professor of Educational Design & Technology at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask participants in his new course to cheat and then ask them to disclose to the rest of the class exactly how they cheated. Being assigned to cheat is like being assigned to hack a computer system. You're not really cheating or hacking.

Having just done workshops last week for faculty that included some discussion of online cheating and plagiarism, I know that this is a topic of great interest to online (and offline) instructors. I am of the belief that practically all the cheating online has an offline equivalent and that online teaching actually offers some safeguards that surpass what is available for face to face classes.

The course runs 8 weeks and covers the vocabulary, psychology, and mechanics of what Professor Bull calls “successful cheating” in online learning.

Cyberethics is a legitimate concern. I think it is also important to put most of your efforts as a teacher into designing assignments to discourage cheating and on prevention rather than focusing on catching students after they have done it.

Bernard Bull believes, after years of studying the topic, that some courses seemed designed in a way for which cheating seemed the best option. Don McCabe of Rutgers University has said much the same thing for a decade.

I have come to believe that universities hiring online proctoring companies monitor students through webcams as an alternative to having students take examinations at a physical testing site is a waste of time and money.

I'm also on board with Bull, McCabe and others who find that the most common cheating tactics are old, tried and true and not particularly high tech. Students are more likely to share papers, work together on assignments, have friends do assignments, copy and paste or buy a paper than to use some elaborate online technique.

The Supreme Court has made a ruling on copyright law that might affect colleges. It gave foreign buyers of things like books and movies the right to resell them in the United States without the permission of the copyright owner.

The 6-3 decision (with somewhat surprising dissent by Ginsburg, Kennedy and Scalia) involved the case of a USC student from Thailand who saw a profitable opportunity by purchasing textbooks at lower costs in Thailand and reselling them in the United States.

From the Washington Post

"Had the court come out the other way, it would have crimped the sale of many goods sold online and in discount stores, and it would have complicated the tasks of museums and libraries that contain works produced outside the United States, Breyer said. Retailers told the court that more than $2.3 trillion worth of foreign goods were imported in 2011, and that many of these goods were bought after they were first sold abroad, he said."

If you use Google Reader, as I do, you have seen the notice there that Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013. Google Reader is a content application and platform that aggregates content served by web feeds. I have used it since 2005 to collect all the RSS feeds of blogs and sites that I want to follow but don't have the time to check every day or even every week. The Reader does it for me and I have folders of categories. So, I can look at my Poetry folder or my Social Media folder or one full of Educational Technology feeds and see all the new things from those sites in one place. Without it, I probably will not look at more than a few of these sites.

After Google launched it in October 2005 through Google Labs, it grew in popularity and eclipsed some other readers that had been popular before. But this month Google announced that it will be shut down on July 1, 2013, due to declining usage.

It bothers me that it is going away and I have no alternative in mind right now. But it bothers me in a much larger sense that this is another Google product/service that is going away. The blog post I saw from Google (in my Google Reader, ironically) was included in a post about "a second spring of cleaning." There have been protests and complaints thrown up in years past when Google gave up on other services like Wave or Buzz but to no avail.

I'm not alone in being very much tied into the Googleverse of tools and I do like that thing talk to each other. My mail knows about my calendar and addresses in email and my calendar become links to Google Maps. And I know that Google wants to tie everything to Plus - which still has not gotten any traction with any of my friends who are not techie by nature. (most of them still live in Facebook.)

In another post "Powering Down Google Reader" that talks about the declining usage as a main reason for
the shutdown, I started to wonder what will be shuttered next. Imagine if Gmail's usage dropped or Google decided (as they did a few years ago) that email needed to be rethought and included a version of email in Google Plus? Should I start moving over to Outlook.com?

It's like when you have a multi-day power outage and you realize how much you rely on certain things to survive or just make life more enjoyable. Yes, Joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."

There has been some online protest in support of Reader, but it seems like a done deal.

Alternatives?  I guess I will look at trying to move my feeds to feedly or some other service. If you'd like to download a copy of all your Reader data, you can do so through Google Takeout. You'll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and a JSON file will include lists of people that you follow, who follow you, items you starred, liked, shared etc. Click here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Once downloaded, your subscription data should be easily transferable to another product.

A plan in California to require public colleges to award credit for certain online courses offered by other institutions and providers has attracted considerable interest and considerable faculty scrutiny.

California lawmakers detailed a plan Wednesday to require the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies. The bill, backed by the powerful leader of the state’s Senate, would force all the state’s colleges – from community colleges to the University of California at Berkeley – to reduce overcrowding by allowing students to enroll in dozens of outsourced classes. The idea immediately captured attention not just among educators, but among pundits and politicians - and not just in California.

Read more:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/14/california-educational-factions-eye-plan-offer-mooc-credit-public-colleges

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/13/california-bill-encourage-mooc-credit-public-colleges