Social anonymity

  by stuartpilbrow

Anonymity on the net is a complicated question. Anonymous hate messages plague discussion boards and comment sections and an increasing number of news media are forcing all commentators to log in with a credible identity in an attempt to block the flood of hate, prejudice and offensive comments. Anonymity is blamed for the spread of net-hate and net-bullying and the reasoning goes that if people are forced to reveal their identity they will moderate their behaviour.

However, what about people who want to discuss matters where revealing identity would be dangerous, as in countries with censorship and political repression, or when you need to step away from your public web profile to discuss more freely than is possible on say Facebook? There's a lot of pressure on Facebook to present a positive, idealistic and highly flattering image of ourselves and it's not a good idea to reveal your weaknesses there. Sometimes we really need to discuss matters that simply don't fit into the tidy, happy and ever upbeat world of Facebook. Maybe you're depressed, worried about family matters, scared, insecure or just downright angry and you don't want your friends and family to see your deepest fears. Sometimes you need to be anonymous.

A new social network called Social number provides an anonymous alternative where you can discuss freely without revealing your identity. According to an article on CNN, The social network where no one knows your name, you are given a random number when you sign up and your identity cannot be traced. Then you can join any of the active discussion groups or start one of your own. It is a social network with all the usual features- minus the photo, profile and name. You have no idea who you're discussing with and so gender and nationality become irrelevant. The network is monitored both by organisers and by members and any offensive behaviour results in expulsion. According to the article and what I can see it manages to keep things relatively clean and even if you're free to rant and complain you can't cross the border into offensive behaviour. Maybe we all need an oasis of anonymity to escape from our digital identity for a while.

Breaking up is hard to do

  by Lauren Manning

We often base our calls for a better use of technology in education on the grounds that students are demanding change. Since they are mostly experienced users of computers, mobiles, social media and gaming they will naturally want to use these technologies and tools in school or university. There is of course a degree of truth here but it's not unusual to see reports of students demanding more lectures and classroom teaching rather than online delivery as well as preferring textboooks to net-based resources. Sometimes the students are more traditional and conservative than the teachers, despite their dependence on technology outside education.

This paradox is described by June Breivik (@junebre on Twitter) in a blog post in Norwegian, Er vi skoleblinde? Hvorfor vil digitalt innfødte ha bøker i skolen?  (Are we school-blind? Why do digital natives want textbooks in school?). Use Google translate to get an English version. June sees the problem as one of deep-rooted tradition where society's view of education is based on a number of non-negotiable concepts. We define education and especially school as follows (slightly paraphrased from original article):

• Learning is hard work
• Learning is not fun and games
• Learning takes place in a school between 08.00 - 16.00 on weekdays
• Homework helps learning
• The teacher is the most important factor for learning
• Learning can be planned and structured
• Textbooks and subjects
• Classrooms in schools
• The teacher has the knowledge
• Theory and practice don't mix
• Examination is evidence that learning has taken place

These "rules" are so deeply ingrained even in the minds of pupils/students that anything that challenges them is viewed with great skepticism. All the metaphors for learning are rooted in this model: classroom, desk, blackboard, lectern etc. This explains why the most successful applications of technology in education have been where it simply offers a digital equivalent of the above; for example the popularity of recorded lectures and learning management systems. More challenging uses of technology such as virtual worlds, gaming and peer learning are seldom accepted other than in temporary projects and research initiatives and are often met by calls to get back to basics.

We have the opportunity to radically change our approach to education and learning but somehow we can't escape the gravitational pull of the classroom. Junes conclusion is that maybe we need to accept that changing such ingrained traditional will take longer than some of us would like. We maybe need to give the process time but not be afraid to experiment and dare to be innovative. At the same time we need to create a culture of innovation and the insight that some experiments will work and some won't. But we learn by failing and being allowed to fail. Learn and build.

Open education - drop in rather than drop out

  by Greencolander

A common criticism of the current wave of more or less open courses is that there is a high drop-out rate with sometimes only 10-20% of students completing the course. In the traditional education system this is seen as a sign of abject failure but should we apply the same principles in judging the impact of open education? Does it really matter who completes the course or not since the motivation for studying via MOOCs and suchlike is not to gain academic credits but simply to learn. If only part of the MOOC is relevant to your current interests you will study that part and then move on. This is not a case of dropping out but more like dipping into a good book to read the parts that interest you.

This is well argued by Donald Clark in a post called MOOCs: ‘dropout’ a category mistake, look at ‘uptake’? It all depends how we view the MOOC movement. If we see MOOCs as part of the traditional credit-based system for students who want degrees then they do not work very well. However as an arena for lifelong learning which you can access whenever you need to without any formal demands then the concept of dropping out becomes irrelevant.

"MOOCs must not be seen as failure factories. They must rise above the education models that filter and weed out learners through failure. Good MOOCs will allow you to truly go at your own pace, to stop and start, go off on an exploratory path and return again. This is what true adult learning is and should be. I always drop out of learning experiences as I never go on formal courses. I decide when I’ve had enough. They should not copy but complement or construct new models of learning."

Of course the universities who offer MOOCs would like to see high completion rates in order to justify their investments. But let's leave the basic layer of open resources and courses free and accessible for all to use and benefit from but focus on value-added services like examination, tutoring, validation, recruitment and advertising as monetisation options. MOOCs are not really threatening the traditional university system - they are widening the scope and reach of higher education and reaching new audiences. As such they should not be judged by the same criteria as traditional courses.

Narrowcasting

  by stoneflower

Narrowcasting is my new word of the week. It turns up in an article by Michael Petrilli, Tweet thine enemy. Basically it's about the way we tend to live in a social media bubble, only following people we agree with and seldom being exposed to opposing views. The author has compared the Twitter followers of various American political and educational figures and examined if there is much overlap.  In most comparisons between followers of republican/democrat, radical/conservative the amount of people who followed both sides was between 5% and 15%. This was also evident in educational debate between traditionalists and radicals; the two sides simply talk past each other and rarely meet.

"The bottom line is that there’s a whole lot of talking past one another in the education debate, though maybe less than in the political debate writ large. Want to be part of the solution? You might start by following on Twitter people whose views you abhor and staying open to the possibility that they might, nevertheless, have a few smart things to say."

No surprise really and I'll admit that I'm probably guilty as charged. We need more serendipity in our net lives - room for the unexpected. Maybe Twitter should introduce a pot-luck feed you can subscribe to which chooses random comments from your field of interest and where you will probably meet views you do not subscribe to. The old term surfing the web that was coined way back in the early nineties was probably the opposite of the sheltered web we live in today. I remember my early surfing days when I simply followed links wherever they took me just for the thrill of discovering what was out there. Now that I feel at home on the net I tend to visit the same places. 

One antidote to all this is StumbleUpon. Here you just click and are taken to a random site that fits the interest categories you fill into your profile. If you don't select too specific interests StumbleUpon will take you to all sorts of pages. If you're not interested you just click and you get a new page and you keep clicking until you stumble upon something interesting. The idea is that StumbleUpon will slowly learn what you like as you refine your preferences and choose ever more specific categories in your profile. However if you don't refine your profile and just keep it guessing you have an extremely random and serendipitous web browser and you never know what you will find. A lot of the selections are just useless, some are bizarre but quite often you find something unexpected. Worth trying now and again to avoid the trap of narrowcasting.

The illusion of learning

  by rathernot

One of the most popular study tools of the last 30 years must be the highlighter pen. Simply reading a text is not serious enough. As soon as you start marking key phrases and paragraphs in neon yellow you show the world, and more importantly yourself, that now you're really studying. I've highlighted many texts in my time and there is a certain feel-good factor in having concrete evidence that I have done more than just read the text. However I wonder if this is an example of a practice that gives an illusion of learning but does not in fact really help at all.

A new article by a group of American researchers, Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques (Association for Psychological Science), examines a number of popular learning techniques and tries to evaluate their effectiveness. Highlighting, rereading and summarizing are all rated as having "low utility" despite being probably the most popular.

"On the basis of the available evidence, we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility. In most situations that have been examined and with most participants, highlighting does little to boost performance. It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively, or when texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference making. Future research should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight effectively, given that students are likely to continue to use this popular technique despite its relative ineffectiveness."

The problem with highlighting is that few people have any real technique to follow. We simply underline things that seem useful at first glance rather than really thinking about what the key points might be. The profusion of neon in your textbook may look as if you've been studying hard but it does very little to help learning. It puts the focus on words and phrases rather then concepts and connections. The authors don't completely dismiss highlighting but stress that it requires more thought and practice to be of much real use.

What techniques work best then? According to the study, techniques such as practice testing (without grading) and distributed practice (spreading revision out over a longer period) gave the best results in terms of long term effect. The study techniques examined in this study however are those most used for self-study and more complex learning techniques through collaboration, reflective writing, peer review and problem-solving are not included.

What is interesting here is that we often rely on techniques that simply do not contribute to learning but are easy to use and give us the illusion of learning.

Read more in an article in Time Ideas, Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques.

Technology must add value

  by Lizette Greco

Simply using technology in class does not help students learn. Using technology to simply replace books, blackboards or pencils will not make any difference either no matter how cool the technology may seem. It's not the technology that makes the difference it's the way it is used and that it is used for the right purposes.

This is demonstrated very well in a post by Kathy Cassidy, The Use and Abuse of Technology in the Classroom, which makes a list of when technology makes a difference and when it does not. The article is aimed at primary school teachers but the arguments apply almost as well to university level. The main argument is to use technology to do things that are simply not possible in the traditional classroom. If something can be done just as well without computers there may not be any relevance in using one. It has to make a difference to the experience and not just act as an electronic substitute.

"I have been concerned, though, by some of the ways that I see technology being used. Technology should not just allow us to do things in a more engaging way; it should allow us to do new things that we thought were not possible. It is those new things that are the real value technology provides. It is not enough to USE technology. You must use it well."

Here are Kathy's five justifications for technology. Read the article for her explanation and examples:

• Technology should be for accessing what was inaccessible
• Technology should be for doing good things in better ways
• Technology should be for sharing with the world. 
• Technology should be for connecting
• Technology should give choices.

Verification as MOOC add-on

CC BY-NC-SA by Viking KARWUR

Not surprisingly I start off 2013 with another development in the MOOC saga. As the search to find viable business cases for MOOCs intensifies Coursera have just announced a new revenue avenue - namely identity verification. According to an article by Paul Fain in Inside Higher Ed, Paying for proof, Coursera  students will be able to buy in to a "Signature Track" with photo and keystroke identification to prove that they have done the course work themselves. Student will then have a verified certificate with a detailed course performance record stored by Coursera which will then give added credibility to the student's work if it is to be exchanged at another institution for credits. These institutions will naturally be wary of student portfolios from MOOCs unless there is convincing proof that the student actually wrote the material.

This fits nicely into the layered model of education I mentioned a few weeks ago: A layered model for education. The foundation layer is the open content available to all and free. Above that in layer 2 comes various packaging solutions where institutions and educators can package the resources into courses that can be offered for free or not. Layer 3 includes the add-ons that are probably going to cost money and in this layer we find Coursera's signature track solution as well as services like tutoring and support. Layer 4 could include testing, examination, quality assurance and so on. The principle is that access to education is open and free for all whereas the higher layers will most likely be offered at a price, though free alternatives may be offered.

What we're seeing here is that universities have realised that you can't sell content and that the business case for MOOCs is selling credentials, verification and examination. The article mentions that  the other MOOC players, edX and Udacity, are also selling proctored testing of students at local test centres. Learning is free and open but if you want credentials and other add-ons then you will have to pay. However if the total costs for this path is lower than the full campus experience then we have succeeded in opening up education to more people. That's the benefit in my opinion.

Searching for open educational resources

One of the often quoted barriers to the adoption of open educational resources (OER) is the difficulty of searching for them in a reliable way. Below is a nice infographic that describes a service I use regularly, in particular for finding photos to use on this blog, namely CCSearch. Here you can search for Creative Commons material in the most common repositories such as Flickr, Google Images, Fotopedia and Wikimedia Commons for photos or Jamendo and SoundCloud for music.

Another tactic is to make an advanced Google search but that requires good information retrieval skills to get all the right search criteria. My colleagues at the Blekinge Institute of Technology here in south-east Sweden have formulated an excellent Google search for teachers that is open for all and that searches only for OER.

Try it at OER@BTH.

by coerll. Learn about infographics software.

Source

Open Learning Recognition

CC BY-SA OERTest

Here's a publication I'd like to recommend from the OERTest project and my colleagues in EFQUEL.

The OERTest project has released its final results in the form a publication, entitled “Open Learning Recognition: Taking Open Educational Resources a Step Further”. The book is the fruit of two years of research by 8 European partners, and provides the reader with the foundation for the development of envisaged framework, organised into the four topics: assessment methods; requirements and standards of resources; credentialisation, certification and recognition and inter-institutional collaboration. The third chapter is devoted to different scenarios of open learning in order to obtain in-depth understanding of the OER challenges and bring closer a basis for identifying vital differences among them to better address these challenges.

The OERTest guidelines and the OERTest Learning passport are presented in the following chapter. Thus this part of the publication essentially brings to the fore transparency and portability concepts. The fifth chapter lays out the extent to which the assessment and certification of learning outcomes achieved through OER is feasible for Higher Education Institutions of different profiles. The results are predicated on a feasibility study undertaken amongst five universities. This publication concludes with the possible impacts of the open learning recognition through the university networks that are dealt with in the last chapter.

Download the publication Learning recognition.

Read more on EFQUEL's site: Open Learning Recognition: Taking Open Educational Resources a Step Further. 

A new layered model for education

CC BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by Sanctu

This week saw the emergence of yet another player in the MOOC market as a group of 12 UK universities under the leadership of Open University formed a new company called  Futurelearn (UK universities embrace the free, open, online future of higher education powered by The Open University). They plan to offer a range of massive open online courses starting next year and thus offering an alternative to the US-based established trio of edX, Coursera and Udacity.

Once again the media is full of enthusiastic quotes from academic leaders and politicians praising this move as revolutionary and it certainly opens up new avenues in higher education particularly in light of the sharp rises in student fees in England and Wales over recent years. However, sometimes it feels as if online learning has only just been invented with the arrival of all the MOOCs of the past year and that there is now only one model in town. The diversity of online learning is seldom discussed and the fact that plenty excellent online education already takes place as part of established universities' regular portfolios. Does the advent of heavyweight MOOC consortia mean that participating universities will transfer existing online courses to the MOOC world and keep their core business of traditional campus teaching under their own roof?

Instead of seeing all this as some kind of conflict between the the old and the new I think we are seeing the establishment of universal access to education. There is an unprecedented global demand for education that schools and universities cannot ever hope to meet since the actual buildings of these institutions can only accommodate so many students. Even if we could build new institutions every week they could never hope to cope with the global demand for education. By making educational resources freely available on the net we can make education accessible to all even if there are major infrastructure problems in many countries. With the help of internet cafes, libraries, learning centres and smart mobiles educational resources can be accessed even by the millions without any hope of owning a computer or mobile.

What is now being established is a free basic layer offering universal access to learning resources and organised course models. This content is provided by institutions (such as the MOOC providers) as well as millions of teachers, students and experts who share their knowledge under Creative Commons licenses. On top of that foundation we can augment the free material with service layers such as teaching, tutoring, guidance, collaboration opportunities, quality assurance, assessment, feedback and examination. These services may be offered by one institution as in the traditional campus university or by various organisations and the student is able to pick and mix from many providers. These add-on layers will be organised in many ways: free, for-profit, high status, bundled, certified, professional, peer-driven etc.

The key is that the foundation layer is freely available for all. Some people will have the skills to learn in peer groups using this material with the simple goal for learning for the sheer sake of learning. Others will be willing to pay for extra tuition and many will be able to pay for examination and certification. There may be low-cost or free certification schemes such as open badges and there will be high status certification at a cost. Some will want the whole experience under one roof and will continue to attend campus universities since they provide all layers in one package and with credible credentials at the end. Others who cannot afford the campus university will need to find a package that suits their learning needs and their financial situation.

So maybe instead of seeing the present trends in open education as a disruptive we should see it all as the establishment of a new educational ecosystem with this layered model emerging. Where access to learning resources is a fundamental right but with many options for interacting and benefitting from them.

Headhunting by MOOC

  by  sabeth718

It's hard to go a week without using the M-word so here's this week's MOOC update. The latest twist in the tale of finding a good business model for MOOCs comes from Coursera and an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Providers of Free MOOC's Now Charge Employers for Access to Student Data. Coursera has just announced that they are offering companies access to information about students who might be interesting to employ. This is an opt-in scheme for all parties and it offers an interesting new avenue for companies wishing to recruit new talent.

"Here's how it works: A participating employer is given a list of students who meet its requirements, usually the best-performing students in a certain geographic area. If the company is interested in one of those students, then Coursera sends an e-mail to the student asking whether he or she would be interested in being introduced to that company. The company pays a flat fee to Coursera for each introduction, and the college offering the course gets a percentage of that revenue, typically between 6 and 15 percent."

This type of recruitment is also offered by Udacity and the article cites a few success stories of top MOOC students who landed jobs at attractive companies as a direct result of their informal learning. Both Coursera and Udacity are examining ways of assessing soft skills (as are many other educators) by analysing student interactions in the course discussion forum. Often companies are more interested in a student's ability in teamwork, taking initiative and creative thinking than in traditional academic skills and therefore this type of link-up between education and workplace offers new opportunities.

Why should employers be interested in students who are participating in a free online course that doesn't even offer formal university credits? The fact that someone has taken the initiative to try a new form of education that involves a considerable amount of self-discipline and independent work is a positive sign to an employer. Many courses involve considerable networking and the ability to search for relevant information and such factors, combined with the actual subject matter of the course, can be interesting to employers. However, this move shows above all how informal learning is beginning to gain formal recognition. Combine this with the Open Badges initiative and suddenly there are several alternative educational paths that may be just as likely to lead you to employment as the traditional road.

According to Udacity's Sebastian Thrun:

"Problems are never solved in isolation in the real world," he said. He said that Udacity might share with an employer someone who has helped 90 to 100 people in discussion forums. "That specific skill has been a better predictor of placement success than academic performance."

Completion rates in online education

  by  JF Sebastian

I'm concerned that we continue to discuss the issue of low completion rates in online courses and see the online delivery form as the problem. Lower completion rates are seen as evidence that online education is inherently inferior to the traditional classroom model and that we must simply accept it as "the next best thing". By using terminology such as distance learning, e-learning and net learning we accept that this type of education is a sub category of the wider concept of "learning" which normally takes place in a classroom with teacher and students in the same physical room. Online learning is assumed to be mostly self-study and students lack the dynamic discussion and interaction of a live classroom. I think the vast majority of teachers and especially academic decision makers still think this is true and see educational technology as something only relevant to so-called distance learning. However the factors behind high completion rates are the same regardless of whether the course is on campus or completely online; namely social interaction, a sense of belonging and a supportive learning environment.

A new article by Jacqueline Aundree Baxter of the UK's Open University in IRRODL (International review of research in open and distance learning),Who am I and what keeps me going? Profiling the distance learning student in higher education, links the issue of completion rates to factors such as group dynamics, teamwork and the teacher's role as mentor and facilitator.

"The research revealed insights into factors linked to the expectations, identities, and support of students which proved influential in terms of their resilience and motivation to remain on course."

It's interesting to read how most students in this study expected their course to be mostly self-study and were positively surprised when online collaboration was expected of them. Here the popular image of online education affects student expectations. Every student will bring with her/him their own preconceptions, fears, insecurities and previous academic experience and the success of each student depends on establishing a sense of belonging, a supportive environment and a can-do attitude. Students have widely varying levels of experience in online collaboration and some may feel inadequate at first. The teacher's role of setting the tone and providing reassurance to the hesitant is crucial in the early stages.

"Expectations and beliefs about work and study roles have been found to be important in the retention of students and professionals. Initial expectations which are not well managed can lead to a sense of let-down and erosion of confidence and feelings of agency, which if not addressed lead rapidly to attrition."

Some of the key factors described in the article for boosting completion rates, regardless of delivery form, are:

• Creating realistic expectations and a clear structure from the outset. The teacher's role in this is crucial.
• Reducing factors that make students doubt and increasing factors that make students want to stay .
• Building a sense of community is essential and, once established, students will support and encourage each other to continue even when the going gets tough.
• Timely teacher interventions when students feel inadequate to the task in hand are worth their weight in gold.

It's not the form of the course that is crucial. It's not about campus versus distance or dividing education into convenient compartments. It's about creating a sense of belonging where students learn how to learn in a supportive environment and where no one ever needs to feel they're on their own. This environment can be created and facilitated with the help of educational technology but it can also be created in a more traditional classroom environment. The basic ingredients are the same and it's that we should be discussing more. Let's talk about learning and take the e- as default.

Drowning in e-mail

Despite the fact that there are much smarter ways of communicating and especially collaborating most people still seem stuck on e-mail. We all complain about e-mail overload but continue to send draft versions of documents back and forth with copies to all. It's inefficient, time-wasting, stressful and sometimes pointless but we just won't quit.

Here's an excellent short video that reveals the horrors of collaborating by e-mail.

Top IT issues

  by  torkildr

What's the trend of the year in educational technology? Most people would immediately shout out MOOCs (as I predicted way back in January, 2012 - the year of the MOOC) but according to an Educause survey, Top-10 IT issues 2012,  the most important concerns are not whether to join the MOOC movement but the fundamental issue of how to integrate IT into all of the university's activities and develop more mature strategies for the use of technology.

The survey asked a panel of higher education IT experts what the biggest single IT-realted issue facing their institution had been in 2012. Here's their top ten:

1. Updating IT professionals' skills and roles to accommodate new technologies and changing IT delivery models
2. Supporting IT consumerization and bring-your-own device programs
3. Developing a cloud strategy
4. Improving the institution's operational efficiency through IT
5. Integrating IT into institutional decision-making
6. Using analytics to support the important institutional outcomes
7. Funding IT initiatives
8. Transforming the institution's business with IT
9. Supporting research with high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

Source: "Educause Top-Ten IT Issues 2012" from Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR)


The common thread here is the need to integrate technology use into all areas of the university from the management down and to ensure that staff have the right competence to deal with this change. IT is no longer simply a technology issue and is no longer limited to the IT department; it supports all processes and affects every member of staff. Educational technology is moving from a marginal pioneer movement of enthusiasts to mainstream and default. Institutional strategies are now needed where before there were simply uncoordinated grassroots initiatives. The tools and software that were once provided in-house are now freely available in the cloud and at the same time the carefully controlled infrastructure of university owned computer labs is being replaced by students using their own devices and expecting access anywhere any time.

The challenges facing the role of IT in higher education are finding strategies of benefitting from the diversity and freedom of cloud-based solutions and personal devices while maintaining some level of control and security. The survey highlight above all else the rapidly changing role of the university IT department.

"This year's list transcends the IT org chart with two predominant themes: the IT organization's obligation to the institution; and the IT organization's relationship to technology outside the institution. The former views the IT organization as an enabler and partner in helping colleges and universities adapt to and even capitalize on changing realities and needs via automation (Issue #4), analytics (Issue #6), business transformation (Issue #8), and research computing (Issue #9). It also recognizes that the IT organization's relationship with institutional leaders must be effective for it to truly support institutional priorities, by integrating information technology into institutional decision-making (Issue #5), funding information technology strategically (Issue #7), and establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution (Issue #10)."

Read more in an article in Campus Technology, Reflecting on the Top IT Issues of 2012

Online cheating - the discussion rolls on

  by  Mr_Stein

The debate about cheating in online courses seems never-ending and, honestly, as long as we set assignments where the answers can easily be found on the net it's not going to go away. Tony Bates writes about the problem in a post called Tools to prevent online cheating. He refers to a recent post by Ki Mae Heussner on Gigaom, Five ways online education can keep its students honest, which lists methods to counter student cheating. These methods involve setting up web cameras to watch students as they take the test, keystroke pattern recognition, browser lockdown and anti-plagiarism software.

If you want to test a student's ability to remember facts then traditional invigilated examinations are still probably the most effective method, though far from foolproof. An alternative often used around the world is local learning centres that can offer students in the region the chance to take tests in an invigilated environment in cooperation with the university. In these situations you can easily have ID checks and ensure that the right person is sitting the exam.

Online tests, however, are always going to be problematic unless we simply stop using this type of examination. A web meeting using for example Skype where the teacher can question the student face-to-face is ideal and reliable but too time consuming for classes with more than a small number of participants. However continuous assessment through a variety of assignments and using different media can give a reliable picture of the students' ability since the teacher can learn to recognize the student's style of expression. The key however is to base assessment on tasks that demand relating practical experience with personal learning; thus making the answers so personal and specific that it is virtually impossible to cheat.

Bates' conclusion however puts the cheating issue into perspective. Cheating means you have missed the point of education and the main person you're cheating is yourself.

"Cheating is often the result of a poor educational process or experience. Once again, this comes down to the distinction between learning as transferring information vs learning as a developmental process. If, as I do, you believe education is a developmental process, it is the student in the end who loses from cheating, because they have missed the point of the exercise, which is self development and growth."