One of the biggest developers of college-level online courses, Silicon Valley’s Coursera, thinks it has figured out an online honesty test to help ensure that enrolled students are really doing coursework themselves – while also generating some welcome income for course operators.
Coursera’s new initiative is called Signature Track. Participating students will pay a $30 to $100 fee at the start of a course and submit a short typing sample that will amount to a unique personal identifier. Those students will then retype that passage at the start of each online session, with Coursera able to check typing speeds and rhythms to ensure that the same registered student is at the keyboard each time. Students also will submit a Webcam photo and an identification card, to help verify their identities.
Coursera currently offers more than 100 free online courses, most of them taught by renowned professors from universities such as Stanford, Duke and the University of Michigan. Some two million people worldwide have signed up for Coursera offerings in the past year, though only a fraction of them stick around to finish all the required coursework.
Since last summer, there has been concern that some student accounts represent pooled efforts to game the system, with various enrollees passing information back and forth in ways that would be seen as cheating in a conventional university. Until online-course operators can build strong deterrents to such schemes, graduate schools and corporate employers aren’t likely to be impressed by an online student’s apparent A-grade in such a class.
Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng said in a statement that Signature Track will let students “verify their identity and show that they did the work, and thus provide a more valuable credential.” Coursera initially is offering Signature Track for about five of its massively open online courses (or MOOCs) in subjects such as genetics, nutrition and microeconomics, with plans to expand it further.
Early MOOCs have been offered free of charge to anyone in the world with an internet connection. That’s created huge waves of enrollment, but also high dropout rates and some complaints about disorganized or insufficient interaction among students seeking to sharpen up their mastery of new material. Still, educators are buzzing about MOOCs’ potential.
This week, the Twenty Million Minds Foundation organized a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, in which MOOC pioneers, California politicians , university leaders, students and consultants wrestled with different ways of harnessing MOOCs’ potential. Panelists generally were excited about the progress made so far; attendees were intrigued but also wary of the risk that haphazardly run MOOCs could undercut educational norms.