Online education is expected to grow, bringing new challenges.  One of the biggest challenges concerns the validity of online assessments.  Questions arise about cheating, including whether or not the person taking the assessments is the student registered for the course.  Studies have tried to determine the amount of cheating in online assessments using student self-reporting.  Concern about the validity of these studies has led to quantitative studies attempting to determine the level of cheating in online classes by comparing unproctored online classes against proctored classes.  This quantitative quasi-experimental study uses such an approach, comparing test scores and the amount of time online unproctored students spend on exams against test scores and the amount of time spent on exams by students proctored in a testing center and by students proctored online using software.  The data for each of the three groups, online-unproctored, testing-center-proctored, and software-proctored, were collected for each of the three unit exams, with data samples over 1,000 for each group on each test.  The means of the exam scores of the unproctored online students were similar to the means of the exam scores of the other two groups, but the means for the amount of time the unproctored online students spent on the exams were significantly greater than were the means of the time spent by students in the either of the other two groups.  The increased amount of time spent by the unproctored students likely indicated students looked up answers during the tests.

I've discovered that having students help me and my college with real-life projects is an effective learning experience. As with most two-year college instructors, I teach a heavy load - 15 credit hours a semester. In addition, I have been working to provide Internet tools and access for faculty and students. I do much of this work on my own time and at my own expense. When I tried using students to help me with my projects, the response was very positive. Many students love the thrill of a "real-life" project and tend to spend many more hours than they would on programs that they regard as just a college assignment. Following are some of the projects that I've assigned to my students. I would be interested to heart about projects that others have tried and about their successes and failures.