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In an effort to define the scholarship performed by professors in academia as more than just "teaching versus research," Ernest L. Boyer, in his influential book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Carnegie Foundation, 1990), concluded that "the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions.

Randy Bass, director of the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP), described the SoTL projects initiated by the participants in VKP. Their central questions were "How did they know that their students were learning?" and "Did the students' learning promise to last?" He writes, "By asking these questions, many faculty discovered early on that what most interested—or eluded—them about their student's learning could not be answered simply by looking at regularly assigned course work."

There seems to be a common sentiment that online courses open up the door for students to become more mischievous and dishonest than they ever would dare in a more traditional classroom setting, but why is that the case?

Can he or she know for sure—even when students are in direct eyesight as they work through an exam—that nothing improper is happening? And what about the instructor who gives take-home exams? How are these any different from the kinds of exams that students in an online course might take?

Perhaps the key for all of us—regardless of where and how we teach our course—is to really rethink just what assessment means, because no matter where the class takes place, someone who wants to behave in a dishonest way will probably figure out how to do so.