Students behaving badly – online.

In my experience, I believe that the vast majority of online students are honest and honestly want to learn the material. Perhaps I’m being a Pollyanna, but even though I have caught students in lies and other dishonest behavior, that doesn’t change my general outlook.

Here are three of my personal “hall of famers” when it comes to bad behavior online:

1) Get the Facts! Student X wrote frantically, the day after a lab deadline, and told me that he had not been able to get online all week due to technical problems. Thus, the late lab report! Oh, if only he could have logged into the course before the deadline! Obviously, he didn’t realize that I had the ability to view (in Blackboard) when he had logged on, how long he had been logged on, and what parts of the course he accessed in that time period. Of course, he had logged into the course virtually every day during the previous week and hadn’t even accessed the lab dropbox. When I let him know that I could see his online activity during the previous week, he literally had nothing to say about it. However, he didn’t try to pull that particular stunt again.

2) Always keep your Department Leadership in the loop. My course policy on lab reports for the first unit of the course is fairly relaxed. Because students can sometimes have trouble getting the lab kits, I allow all the labs for the first unit to be turned in as late as the end-of-unit deadline. If they choose to turn in the first lab report prior to that, I will mark it and return it and it can be resubmitted for full points (this cuts down on the learning curve). One semester, student Y waited until the unit deadline to turn in all three of the Unit One lab reports. She didn’t do well on any of the three, having obviously not consulted the syllabus for the report requirements. She sent me a very polite email asking if she could please re-submit all three reports, since she was unaware of the course policies. I politely declined and pointed out that she could still get full credit on the remaining 6 lab reports. That’s when things got nasty. She began posting scathing comments about what a bad teacher I was to the discussion boards and sent me an email explaining how I was robbing her of her “A”. I immediately notified my Department Chair and sent him all of the previous email traffic so he could be ready for the gathering storm. Sure enough, her next step was to contact everyone at CCCOnline that she could find an email for, complaining that I was only interested in penalizing students, and not in helping them learn. Thankfully, she was quickly squelched and decided to drop the course.

3) Communicate in writing and keep all your emails. The last in our rogues’ gallery is the “Absent-minded Prevaricator.” I was calculating final grades a couple of days after the course was over, and noticed that student Z had not taken the final exam! I immediately contacted him via his external email and asked him if everything was OK. He replied that all was well, but that he had simply forgotten about the final. I let him know, since this was the case, that I would have to assign him a grade of “C”, which is what he had without the final exam. He said he understood and reiterated that it had been his fault. Then, he sent this email to the CCCOnline Registrar:

“Hello,

I dont know who I should be contacting about this. I had an emergency and was NOT able to take my chemistry final. I thought my teacher was going to extend the deadline for me, but he didnt read my emails. He thought I blew off the final because my grade was passing and very good at that. I ONLY needed to answer 5 questions right to get a "B" letter grade in this class.

He turned my grade in with a "C." This is unexceptable because I SHOULD have had a B and I actually would have gotten an A if I aced the final, which I had planned on doing. Please, I need help ASAP! Im sorry this email is so frantic but Im freaking out knowing that I got a C because I couldnt take my final exam.”

Well, it was comforting to know that he was planning to “ace the final”, but he was clearly lying about everything else. Since I had saved all the email traffic, we were able to quickly put this one to bed without further incident. I shudder to think how difficult this would have been if I had conversed with him over the telephone instead of email.

Even though you will occasionally run into some dastardly characters, and you should always keep your RADAR on for suspicious behavior, don’t forget that most students are being honest with you. Treat everyone with consideration, but be ready to deal with the situation if things turn ugly.