Education Technology is Causing More Academic Dishonesty

  Education technology is a very good tool to help students engage more in learning, especially during the pandemic because these technologies made educational resources accessible to every student in whatever format that you can think of, and it is able to connect students and teachers of different age groups, interests, countries, and even economic backgrounds. However, edtech is not the digital heaven for education as one might have thought, but rather, it might actually create more academic dishonesty amongst students, which is deters the purpose of education.

As the edtech industry grows during the pandemic, more and more companies engage in cheap copy-pastas for their materials, rather than come up with creative ways to make their students understand the material better. As a result, they create contents that failed to stimulate the interests of the students, which then causes students to have a weak grasp of the material, thus induces the incentive for cheating.

Cheating is quite common among students, as around 95% of them admitted to academic dishonesty at some point in their lives, according to a 12-year long survey. They do this because this is the easy way to get good grades, which will be a stepping stone for them to go to an elite university. This phenomenon has been drastically increased by the pandemic as it causes students to learn in front of a computer. This causes students to feel detached from learning, which will lead students to feel less motivated to try, thus aggravating the incentive to cheat. 

What edtech companies are doing is disconnecting students from the learning environment. Giving students free answers to their homework definitely will cause students to lose the incentive to learn, which is what causes cheating. We need to realize that cheating is partly because of the flaws in our teaching methods. Therefore, to minimize cheating, we need to teach better, and edtech companies have to create content in ways that suit the need of every student as an individual, rather than engage in cheap copy-pastas.  

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