Cheating – can it be stopped?

I often get this question with elearning, ‘how do you know that the person completing the assessment or test online is the actual student and not a clever friend or family member’. Honestly, I don’t know. But this is not a new dilemma. If you think about even an assignment set for a ace to face group it may not be written by the actual student. Distance based education (paper based) always had this problem. Of course you could do all of the assessments in class but generally that is not going to work. So is there an answer? Strangely enough, maybe technology and elearning is eventually going to make it close to impossible to cheat. Read this article which outlines a new elearning system that tackles cheating. If this works it may be the answer and doesn’t require you to actually sit there and watch every student doing the test. Could it work with lengthy assignments rather than tests. Possibly. I wonder though. How long will it take before someone figures out the way around this system. If it can be thought of, someone will probably try it.