WCET Focus Area: Student Authentication | wcet.wiche.edu - 0 views
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George Bradford on 18 Nov 10"Background Student authentication in distance education has been an issue of interest to federal policy makers for several years. The growth in enrollments and in the number of educational providers of online learning fueled concerns about the ability of institutions to verify the identity of online students throughout the cycle of an online course: registration, participation, assessment, academic credit. Passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, followed by federal rulemaking, resulted in new regulations. One regulation required accrediting agencies to assure distance and correspondence education programs have processes in place to verify student identity. Photo of Asian female student in front of computer The issue is complex and frequently misrepresented. Among many e-learning professionals, the issue seems unfairly aimed only at online education when similar concerns of identity falsification could apply in traditional higher education settings. The policy and regulatory conversations concerning identify authentication, originally focused on academic dishonesty, now encompass the serious problem of financial aid fraud, as reported in some high profile cases. WCET has led a number of important efforts aimed at informing policy makers, accrediting agency leaders, and online program administrators of different approaches-pedagogical as well as technological-that ensure their compliance with the regulation but also raise the conversation to a more widely relevant discussion of academic integrity. WCET's Study Group on Academic Integrity and Student Authentication, established in March 2008, continues its work to identify and disseminate information on promising practices to promote academic integrity of which identity authentication is but one component."