Episode 115: DEI, OpenAI, and Proctoring – making sense of it all with Jordan Adair, Vice President of Product at Honorlock
Jordan began his career in education as an elementary and middle school teacher. After transitioning into educational technology, he became focused on delivering products designed to empower instructors and improve the student experience. He currently holds the position of Vice President of Product at Honorlock.
Is education leading the DEI wave or is it falling behind?
There are a few big hurdles that people are struggling to overcome. With a decentralized approach to the DEI in a lot of cases where there is a lot of information spread across various departments and people at a university or institution and they are struggling to bring that all together into a cohesive plan. An example of this would be a school that might be using hundreds of different applications across different departments and all of those applications have their little intricacies and details regarding accessibility, equity, and inclusion. There is usually a lot of documentation that a school has put together around how to best leverage the tools at your disposal to still meet some of the DEI requirements or to hit some of the DEI initiatives. The issue now is that you have 20 or 30 different people across an institution, all trying to keep these documents and keep track of what to use when to use it, and how an application interacts when students have accommodations. How do you set up this properly for an online test versus an in-person test if you have to deal with students that might have a disability? All that information is dispersed and schools are having a tough time understanding how to bring that together in one central location.
How can Honorlock help institutions deliver better testing?
Honorlock has a feature called search and destroy which is targeting content that is leaked online. They take a test question and try to find what sites they exist on and then give the instructor feedback saying this is leaked content so the professor might want to change the question or if they own the content, they will allow them to send a DMCA to take down notice so the content gets removed off the site. The interesting part is because of the feature, Honorlock is tracking the percentage of questions that have leaked online over time. Pre-covid the number was 12% but post-covid the number is 36%. This is a 3x increase in the number of questions that were being leaked out to sites. You have to keep in mind there are permanent online courses that have access to that content today regardless of in-person or hybrid. There are a lot of in-person classes that adopted proctoring during the pandemic and are still using it today in conjunction with their in-person course. There could still be students coming into class for lectures but they still might test online to save class time or students might just find it more convenient. They do not have to deal with driving into a testing center. This is the reality of proctoring and how it is going to play a role in higher education is irrelevant if another pandemic happens or not. It is playing a big role and that role is going to continue to grow as students tend to prefer the hybrid approach to education where they have a choice of in-person versus online.
AI tools being used and how to counteract them
When talking about defending against AI tools, this is a different component. With ChatGPT, there are some features that Honorlock has in place to help prevent cheating. One of them is called Browser Guard which essentially is gonna block a student from navigating outside of their test window. Copy and paste is also blocked as well so you will not be able to copy the question in ChatGPT and you are not going to be able to copy the response and paste it back. Additionally, there are ChatGPT and AI-related extensions that can be installed so that will be blocked too. They have introduced extension blocked for these potential cheating extensions. As an instructor, there are exams where you do not want your students to have access to ChatGPT but students are going to need to adapt and get accustomed to how to use and how to leverage AI. There is a professor who was proctoring their test but they have turned off their browser guard so the professor let the students go and utilize whatever resources they wanted. Primarily, this was geared toward ChatGPT and they have their students not only submit the essay that ChatGPT wrote but the requirement was that you had to submit the prompts that you used to guide ChatGPT to that answer. The professor was not only getting Ai generated responses but human prompts because those are really what's going to tell you if the student understands the material.
Contact Jordan Adair
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdradair
Learn more about Honorlock
Website: https://honorlock.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/honorlock-llc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Honorlock
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/honorlockintegrity/
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This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, The iPaaS for Higher Education.
About N2N Services
Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.
N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.
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