Call for Papers – Special Issue

Submission Deadline: March 15, 2009  

Integrity and Identity Authentication in Online Education

A Special Issue of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching is planned for June 2009 that will be focused on the topic of integrity in the online environment and authenticating the identity of students taking online classes. This is a timely topic in light of the provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (H.R. 4137) that requires that institutions that offer distance education “…have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education or correspondence education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit”. As rule-making with respect to this legislation is in progress, articulating effective approaches to meeting this requirement is essential. Many in the distance education community have already sought to reframe the conversation to focus on pedagogical and curricular approaches, as opposed to costly and potentially invasive technological ones.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

• Designing courses and assessments to promote academic integrity in the online environment
• Hardware and software solutions for identity authentication and/or the promotion of integrity (e.g.,plagiarism detection systems), including integration into learning management systems
• Institutional strategies for the promoting academic integrity and identity authentication
• Enforcement of identity authentication
• Case studies involving identity authentication
• Legal compliance issues of identity authentication
• Knowledge-based authentication
• Security issues of identity authentication schemes

Manuscripts submitted for this special issue should adhere to the published guidelines of JOLT, found at https://jolt.merlot.org/guidelines.html. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the Summer 2009 issue of JOLT.

To be considered, manuscripts must be submitted online by March 15, 2009.

For more information, please contact the JOLT editors at jolteditors@melot.org.