Academic Integrity, Effectiveness and Continuous Quality Improvement In Online Nursing Education

 Online Nursing Education and Academic Integrity, Effectiveness and Continuous Quality Improvement

Academic Integrity in Online Courses In Nursing Education, Effectiveness and Continuous Quality Improvement In Nursing Education.

Academic Integrity in Online Courses In Nursing Education

    Academic integrity must be observed and protected in the online community, as well as in the classroom. Policies may need to be written to include online courses or may need to be adapted to be more inclusive of or specific to the online course. In addition, norms of respect for individuals and their ideas must be observed. 

    All expectations must be communicated to the students in the syllabus. Recent concern about the reported lapses in academic integrity in higher education has prompted faculty to reconsider how to manage plagiarism and cheating on tests in their on-campus and online classrooms. Plagiarism involves using the work of another without attributing credit to the original author. 

    The electronic environment provides students with easy access to papers and projects from students throughout the world, as well as from students in similar or previous courses within the same school. Faculty have a responsibility to assist students in learning the conventions of citing published work and to be proactive in offsetting the potential for plagiarism. 

    Simple measures include developing an honor code statement, requiring students to submit copies of all cited references, selectively altering assignments each semester, and choosing assignments that can be completed only by using original work such as a care plan for a specific patient. 

    More complicated and expensive measures include purchasing plagiarism detection software that faculty can use to check students' written work for similarities to other student papers or published works. 

    Cheating on tests offered in the online environment can occur because students may be able to print tests and share them, use textbooks or Internet sites to answer questions, sit together in a computer cluster and assist each other in answering test questions, or have someone else take the test for them (Hart & Morgan, 2009). However, as Hart and Morgan (2010) also point out, in one small study of students in an RN to BSN program, cheating was more prevalent in the on-campus classroom and occurred more frequently among younger students in the traditional classroom. 

    Nonetheless, faculty have responsibility for creating a culture of academic integrity and test security. As in the classroom, methods for ensuring test security can be simple and low cost or they may be complicated and involve additional human and fiscal resources (Reising, 2002). 

    Easy -to-manage security in online tests includes having students log in with a user name and password, using timed tests, adding new questions to each test, giving “open book” tests, and using test software features to scramble test answers or generate alternative versions of examinations. 

    Faculty can also design evaluation and grading plans that use a variety of evaluation methods that do not depend solely on testing. Most faculty ask students to sign academic honesty pledges, and Hart and Morgan (2009) recommend making consequences clear; others find that indicating to the student that it is easy for faculty to track and compare student responses on online examinations is a sufficient deterrent. 

    More complex measures to prevent or track cheating include tracking Internet protocol addresses for the computers on which students are taking a test, hiring proctors to observe students while taking the test, and purchasing browser security products (Hart & Morgan, 2009). Some faculty have used video cameras to monitor students while they are taking an online test. 

    Students use small cameras on their computers that are monitored by faculty or a proctor. In one study ( Mizra & Staples, 2010) researchers found that the experience of being observed on the camera was uncomfortable for the students, and that the students themselves believed it would be easy to cheat because the camera did not view the entire testing area. 

    New advances in proctoring technology use analysis of keystroke rhythms along with web cameras. Finally, faculty may require students to take the test or skills checkoff in a proctored classroom on campus or in the clinical agency. Ultimately, and particularly for high-stakes examinations, faculty are responsible for providing examination security and must take reasonable means to create a secure environment for all students.

Effectiveness and Continuous Quality Improvement In Nursing Education

    The use of online learning in nursing education continues to increase, particularly as doctorate in nursing practice and PhD programs seek to make their programs distance accessible. There is a growing body of evidence about the effectiveness of online courses and programs and various pedagogical approaches to designing courses and teaching them online. These findings can be used to guide current practice and improve existing courses.