“Before Betsy Chao, a senior here at Rutgers University, could take midterm exams in her online courses this semester, her instructors sent emails directing students to download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology.” …
“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,”
Huh. Interesting. This might not sit well with people who feel they have unsightly knuckles.
There’s other ways to prove legitimacy of online courses. Some schools just refuse to think outside the box a little and work with technology instead of against it. For example, most instructors I had at National University would make exams only 20% of the grade and allowed it to be open book… The catch? It’s timed and you only had about 30-60 seconds per question so very little time to look up each and every one, you either know it or you don’t. Or it would be short answer questions that of course have to be original or you’d get flagged for plagiarism like with any written test. The rest of the grade was made up of periodically assigned discussions and group activities where you had to log on regularly, and the majority of the grade was a large, final project where you really demonstrated the cumulative concepts of the course, which is very comparable to any exam (multiple choice shows that you can memorize, great, but what about application?) I only attended N.U. for one semester then transferred these units to a community college, but I think my education there was as legitimate as any. (Also, I took speech online as well. For every speech we had to record ourselves giving our presentation to a room of at least 8 people over the age of 18 who had to be visible on screen as being in the same room as us, it was still nerve wracking…)