Faculty Spotlight – Alan Francis

Dr. Alan Francis, Applied Arts & Sciences
Changing Content in Online Courses

As an online instructor I have found that it is important to change the content in my courses frequently. I believe by making certain changes it will reduce plagiarism on research papers and possible cheating on online exams and quizzes. After a semester has ended I will review the content within a specific online course to see what needs to be enhanced or changed for a future semester. Often times, most changes will require very little time on the part of the instructor.

For example, I may require my students to complete a research paper in which they select from four predetermined topics. The students will also be required to submit their research paper to Turnitin. From past experience, I have observed that when the same research topics were carried over from the spring to the fall semester, TurnItIn would highlight some research papers with a high percent of textual content that had been submitted by students from previous semesters. By changing the research paper topics more frequently in my online course, I observed that the Turnitin percentage results were lower.

Exams and quizzes will be enhanced or changed each semester to curtail possible student cheating. Many times instructors may use the same exams and quizzes for several semesters without making any changes to the exam questions or answer choices. When using multiple-choice exams and quizzes in my course, I will change the answer choice order for several of the questions. For example, if the first question on a quiz has four possible answer choices (a, b, c, and d) with the correct answer choice being in the “C” position, I will shuffle all four of the possible answer choices and have the correct answer in the “A”, “B”, or “D” position. Question order will also be changed. For example, Question 1 will take the place of Question 8 and Question 8 will take the place of Question 1. In addition, some questions will be rephrased by replacing key words with synonyms. Making these changes could possibly reduce student cheating.