More or Less (Part Five)

- By Woody Brown

A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course

(in Seven Easy Lessons)

(Link to Lesson One)
(Link to Lesson Two)
(Link to Lesson Three)
(Link to Lesson Four)

Lesson Five: A Fraudulent Potential

     “And this is what we celebrate in Wikipedia is pretending that there’s some absolute truth that can be spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn’t matter.”

--Jaron Lanier

Are you a cheater? Have you ever cheated on anything? If not, a) I think you’re lying, and b) you are in the minority of the American public. Various studies have found that 70% of high school students have cheated at least once.[1] When it comes to higher education, 15-20% of students at small liberal arts colleges cheat, while as much as 75% of the student body at a large public university has cheated.[2] Cheating happened (note the lack of an agent) all the time at my high school and I saw it in college as well. It has been and continues to be problematic for education because it violates the fundamental premises of equality, honesty, and fairness that condition academic growth.

Can a student cheat on a MOOC? If cheating is more common at large public universities, recall that MOOCs bill themselves as basically the largest, most public universities. Cheating on a MOOC is remarkably, fatally easy. Trust me, I did it. At one point, I copied and pasted a large portion of a Wikipedia article and turned it in as part of one of my responses. Even at this early juncture (which, as we just learned, is really not so early), several websites have sprung up to fill the enterprising MOOC-cheater’s demand.  Guaranteeing at least a B in the class, “NoNeedtoStudy.com, WeTakeYourClass.com and BoostMyGrades.com, among others, will take an entire online course for you.”

My MOOC (this may be common to Coursera courses in general) employed several methods intended to curtail cheating, none of which was successful.  I took my course through Coursera’s Signature Track, a program that, for $50, “links your coursework to your identity.” What this means for the student is that every time she writes a response and submits it, she must type a sentence-long, pre-written script that is a condensed version of the Coursera Honor Code.  This is equivalent to a hand-written signature. A progress bar moves as the student types, which gives the impression that the time it takes the student to type the sentence is being compared to previous times the student has typed the same sentence. If you are like me, this makes typing that sentence a uniquely nerve-wracking process. In any case, this is not the case. The website then accesses the student’s webcam and asks to take a photograph of the student’s face and driver’s license.  (The driver’s license need only be photographed once, but the student’s face must be photographed for every assignment.) This made me feel uncomfortable and paranoid, but I took the MOOC before the NSA leaks—it was a happier, simpler time, one perhaps more suited to Apple’s new fingerprint-scanning iPhone than today.

As I said, none of this prevented me from cheating. At one point, I had a friend write the final paragraph of one of my assignments and I simply put my face in front of the webcam when it came time to take the picture. The psychological effect of accessing the student’s webcam, however, is pretty remarkable. In my case, a small light next to the lens turned on and I felt immediately that I was being watched, which, after all, I was. I was then shown an image of myself and there I sat, a disheveled Narcissus faced with himself as a picture of the potential for academic dishonesty and fraud. But then I clicked a button, my face was gone, and the deed was done.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth, who recorded the video lectures for my MOOC, used several techniques to try to implicate his audience and force it to identify as students in a classroom, not as viewers in their own rooms. The following is from the downloadable transcript of the first video lecture of the third unit of “The Modern and the Postmodern”:

What we're talking about here with, Flobair is a disillusion, although disillusion meant, remember that's what we talked about with Marx in the Manifesto too. For Marx disillusionment was what the Bushwazee provided, they stripped away the halo over all sentimental occupations, remember we talked about that, all that is solid melts into air, that kind of disillusionment.  But for Marx, that was disillusionment that woke you up to history.  You wake up to history, you get rid of your illusions, the clouds go away from your eyes, and then you see what you're really supposed to do with your sober senses. For Flaubert, when you wake up to history, you realize you should retreat to art. Get rid of your illusions And, and, and go to art, go to aesthetics and a great example that is, is, Madame Boary, we're reading, Lydia Davis', wonderful new translation. and what we're going to do for the rest of the time today is really just focus in on some of the key themes of the novel which I, I, I trust you have, you have read and if you haven't read it, you should stop the video and don't, as one of my teachers use to say, don't deny yourself the pleasure any longer. Go get the book, read it and, and then come back to the video and, and we can, we can talk some about it. [sic]

Before we proceed, note the errors that abound. Never mind the fact that a deaf student would be up a proverbial creek—this is how the MOOC machine understands human speech. President Roth and Coursera saw no issue with making this transcript freely available despite the fact that it essentially performs the MOOC’s misrecognition of the student as a computational device, a rational actor whose chief desire is cost-effectiveness and speed.

The final two sentences, however, are key. President Roth breaks the fourth wall[3] and gently chides the reluctant student. Though it is easily missed, this is a small forced celebration of the convenience of the MOOC format (“you should stop the video and don’t, as one of my teachers used to say, don’t deny yourself the pleasure any longer”[4]). Primarily, though, it is a maneuver educators make all the time. If Roth conveys his mild disappointment, he gives the student the impression that he has expectations she might conceivably disappoint. This is all for show—for all we know, the lectures were recorded well before the MOOC began enrolling students. “Come back to the video and […] we can talk some about it,” is a strange kind of joke, one that functions despite the fact that the student presumably knows intellectually that there is no way anyone will be able to participate in a discussion except the lecturer himself. Roth was not anticipating reticent students, he was conveying a coded message to everyone watching the lecture: “If you do not do the work I assign, I will know.” These sorts of statements function with students because they situate the teacher in the role of the person whom the student supposes to know much more about a given subject than she (the student) does. Unconsciously, the student understands the subject supposed to know as essentially a mind-reader, someone who “will just know” she has not done the assigned reading even if she does not speak once in class. Roth’s careful decision to say these comments betrays an awareness of what any course that is massive, open, and online lacks. And his comments do not manage to repair that lack, not one bit.

Woody Brown is a writer living in Buffalo, NY.  He graduated from Amherst College in 2011 with a degree in English.Woody Brown is a writer living in Buffalo, NY.  He graduated from Amherst College in 2011 with a degree in English.