Research Proposal Presentation Title

Online courses on the academic integrity

Student researchers

Fanyi Meng, Qiaoyi Lin, Daichun Zhou, Cecilia Chen

What is your research question?

What is the impact of online courses on the academic integrity among university students during the epidemic?

Research proposal keywords or concepts

Sustainability education, Online courses, Academic integrity, COVID-19 epidemic

How would you summarize your proposed research idea?

We will analyze the difficulties that students encounter when conducting online classes, because this is related to students' academic integrity in online classes. We analyzed three key parts of the study.

First of all, the stress value and reasons that online courses bring to students
For students, the degree to which students want to cheat in online classes
The main reason why students cheat

We hope that the results can help improve the online curriculum system, and according to students honest feedback, give the right direction and help. In the future, teaching results in online classes will be the same as traditional class.

Where is the literature gap and how does your proposed research attempt to fill that gap?

We believe that all the current literature is basically about the impact of current or original online courses, but cannot fully represent the impact of online courses on future life, as well as the measures that will be taken for online courses in other aspects. Therefore, in order to bridge this gap, we will assume that there will be some limitations and changes in the solution and discussion of problems that may occur in the future. Some assumptions will be made about future problems and some solutions will be analyzed.

Why is this gap worthy of research?

Online courses are pervasive in the future.

Universities have already paid attention to the significance of integrity issues in traditional class, so integrity also need to be concerned when online courses appear.

Focus on what students’ real thought about integrity could make this topic more objective.

What future change could this research possibly contribute to, related to sustainability?

Through our research, we can understand the disadvantages of online courses. On the other hand, re-planning the pressure brought by online courses, considering the reasons for students to cheat. Analyze whether online courses are likely to become a model of mass education in the future.

What made your group interested in and/or what excites you about your proposed topic?

As we experience online courses, we experience its benefits as well as its drawbacks. In the research, more people were found to cheat in online courses. Because online grades can be inflated by cheating, online courses offer higher grades than traditional education (Dendir et. al, 2020). We are curious about the increasing number of cheaters and hope to explore the reasons for this, in the hope of contributing to the sustainable development of online courses.

References

Dendir, S., & Maxwell, R. S. (2020, November 5). Cheating in online courses: Evidence from online proctoring. Computers in Human Behavior Reports. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958820300336?via%3Dihub