BRIAN SMITH Editor in Chief
An article from the July 25 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports about a bill in Congress that features a paragraph suggesting the requirement of remote proctors to spy on students taking online courses – and SCAD-eLearning doesn’t want any part of it.
The remote proctor paragraph in the bill is part of renewing the Higher Education Act, and according to that article, no one in Congress objects to it.
“[Remote proctoring] implies doubt of students, and doesn’t fit well at SCAD,” Vice President for SCAD-eLearning Darrell Naylor-Johnson said in response to the article.
A remote proctor is a desktop device equipped with a camera, microphone, fingerprint scanner and keystroke recorder. It grants a student access to testing software by checking their identity with the fingerprint scanner. It then records the test-taking process by monitoring the student’s surroundings, and what the student is doing on the computer.
The Securexam Remote Proctor is one particular third-party device which costs students $150. Naylor-Johnson said he thinks the remote proctors are bizarre, and become an extra $150 tax on students from mistrusting educators. Also, he said a remote proctoring device would put some students’ focus on ways to get around the device to continue cheating, rather than putting their focus on communicating with their professor and strengthening the learning experience.
Naylor-Johnson said that “cheating isn’t proactive, and students are aware of it” – that when they enter the professional world and aren’t capable of showing an employer the skills they would have learned in a course, they pay the consequence of dishonesty.
SCAD-eLearning would rather employ ways of assisting students, than doubting them, said Naylor-Johnson. Such ways include SafeAssignments, a part of Blackboard that allows students to scan their papers for cases of plagiarism before they turn the paper in for a grade.
“There’s a misunderstanding that online courses aren’t taught by real professors – real people,” said Naylor-Johnson. He went on to suggest that instead of cheating, students should bring their concerns to the professor who teaches their online course, as they’re there to help.
