Collection-Based Education by Distance and Face to Face: Learning Outcomes and Academic Dishonesty

Assembling and curating specimen collections is a valuable educational exercise that integrates subject-specific skills such as field collection, curation, identification, organization, and interpretation of relationships. Collection projects have been used primarily in face-to-face classes, but they can be readily adapted for distance education. The primary challenges to using collection projects in distance education center on two concerns: (1) whether distance students learn as much as their face-to-face peers and (2) whether academic dishonesty occurs more often in distance education than face to face. This study addressed both concerns by assessing learning outcomes in two entomology courses with both face-to-face and distance sections and evaluating the frequency of specimen-based plagiarism (submitting specimens collected by someone else). An ungraded survey testing students’ insect identification knowledge found equivalent learning outcomes in face-to-face and distance classes. Insect collections were monitored for plagiarized (resubmitted or purchased) specimens in a 5-year “mark-release-recapture” investigation. Academic dishonesty was detected in fewer than 2% of collections; cheating was more than 12 times more likely in distance than in face-to-face classes. This study’s findings raise the possibility that distance learning assessments can be artificially inflated by cheating, suggesting that evaluations of distance learning should be considered in light of academic dishonesty. These results highlight the benefits and challenges of collections as teaching tools in distance education and underscore the need for instructors to be vigilant about academic integrity.