VCU - Technology Services

There's a bill in Congress related to the Higher Education Act, which has implications for schools with distance education programs. The bill includes a single sentence that states that such institutions must implement processes to verify that a student who registers for a course (or program) is the same as the one who participates in it. Here's what it says:

the agency or association requires an institution that offers distance education to have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit

And the bill goes to great lengths to define distance education, but it boils down to any course in which the instructor and students are separated. VCU offers such courses.

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education explores some of the technologies which are available to help with user authentication. These include tried and true technologies like fingerprint readers and challenge questions, as well as keystroke pattern analysis and webcams photos reviewed by remote proctors. With authentication there are 3 categories of choices - methods that rely on something the user has, something the user knows and something the user is. When the risk to mitigate involves willful deceit by the user, the first method is useless and the second is difficult to implement effectively since it's trivial for a person to share basic information that could be asked. So it's likely that the types of technologies adopted will consist of biometrics (such as fingerprint scans, retina scans and subdermal capillary patterns) and visual comparison of the student to a baseline image.

Of course, technology like this has a cost. In addition to a financial component there are privacy and usability concerns. But there are some larger issues that need to be considered.

1. Is cheating more rampant in a distance education course than in a traditional classroom environment?

2. How is the authenticity of the baseline sample being ensured?

If a school needs to collect a photo of the student or digitize a fingerprint as part of the enrollment process to use for authentication, the school needs to be sure the individual who submits that information is in fact who they claim to be. If a person masquerades as another throughout the entire process, a person could conceivably earn a degree without completing any work. To close the gap the person's identity needs to be verified during enrollment. A less effective control would be to publish sufficient information from a student's academic record and a photo online. But an individual's appearance changes over time and if two people resemble each other enough, they can still defeat the system.