Brent Warner 0:01
What do you do if you suspect a student is fraudulently enrolled in your class? Schools aren’t the only ones feeling the pressure to ensure students are legitimate. Teachers get their spidey senses up too. We’ll discuss what the average teacher can do. This is the HigherEdTech podcast season seven, Episode 13.

Tim Van Norman 0:31
Welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College,

Brent Warner 0:42
and I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about. Welcome.

Tim Van Norman 0:51
We’re glad you’re here with us. So to me, this is welcome to the first week of classes.

Brent Warner 0:58
Oh, this is welcome to wrapping up the first month of classes at IVC. You are, like most schools around the state. You’re starting now. Your classes are starting now. But you know, we’re into it. We’re in the thick of things, and so it might be, well, it’s not all it’s not late. So this conversation is kind of happens all semester long, right, no matter what. And sometimes you’re like, take a little while to start looking and saying, Hey, wait a second. What’s going on with this student, right? What’s happening and, you know, so today we are talking about, you know, fraudulent student enrollments and and this idea here can be a little bit tricky to him, because especially for me, I’m in an in person class, right? And so, okay, we know things do exist with in person fraudulent enrollments, right? Like, hey, I signed up and it’s my name, but I paid somebody to go into the class and take the whole class for me on my behalf. Yes, that does happen, but not nearly to the level of the attempts of just straight up bought or, you know, serviced online enrollments, and especially for asynchronous classes, right? Yeah.

Tim Van Norman 2:14
And I mean, this semester, I’m teaching two Introduction to Business classes, and one of the things that I find interesting is by Wednesday of the first week of class, I have an assignment that students have to submit. If they do not contact me or submit that assignment, I am required to drop them by Thursday night. In fact, on Thursday I’ll usually get an email saying, Hey, have you dropped your students yet?

Brent Warner 2:46
Okay, yeah, so first week of class, that’s part of the school’s intention of dropping fraudulent enrollments. Yeah?

Tim Van Norman 2:51
Yep. And so that that helps, but that’s one of those things where, hey, we’ve got to do something to battle this, because it’s not just a onesie twosie. Oh yeah, we had one in my class. Now I’m seeing somewhere up to 10 to 15% of my class could be

Brent Warner 3:14
Yeah., and you know, here’s the thing. We’ll get into all the background of it. But the thing that’s a bummer about it is like those are taking spots from students who actually want to be there, right? Especially when you have a wait list on your class, or, you know, a student needs this thing to graduate, or whatever else is going on. Like, it’s it’s doing. It’s not just like, hey, we’re doing this for and there’s reasons for it, but like, it’s not just that. It’s also the negative effect that it has on other people, and the invisible effects that it has, which, which are really problematic, and a shame, too. So, so anyway, Tim, you’ve got, you’ve got a bunch of background set up here for this, so let’s get into it.

Tim Van Norman 3:53
So let’s start with what’s the problem? And as you mentioned, it’s taking student seats from the classes. Also, as teachers, we’re often disincentivized to drop them, because if we drop them, that means lower enrollment in our class. And so that can cause problems. But if we keep them, then we have a higher failure rate in the class, and so that caused other problems. And so it’s a lot of different moving targets and, and that’s a hard thing for teachers who are really, realistically, there’s a lot of front lines in this particular problem, but teachers definitely are on one of those front lines.

Brent Warner 4:37
Yeah, yeah. And teachers get stretched thin on this, right? It’s like, you know, like, just want to teach our class. We want to work with our students, right? We don’t want to be out there, you know, trying to figure out which, which students are real, which students are fake. What’s going you know, like, I mean, it’s just like, it’s, it’s, it takes a heavy toll, even just the process of trying to figure that out. And I will say, I think, before. To get too far into it, things like district services and statewide enrollment. And, I mean, they, they take care of a huge chunk of it before it even shows up in our classroom, right? So I don’t want to, I don’t want to kind of say, like, oh, teachers are the only ones doing anything about this. That’s why no means the case, you know, the the, I don’t know if we have the numbers on this Tim, but you know, the vast majority of fraudulent enrollments are chopped before they get even to your you know, enrolled in your class, right? But, but on the other hand, we still have this problem to deal with, and those are the most sophisticated ones, because they’ve gotten all the way through that system, right?

Tim Van Norman 5:41
Right, right, well, and along those lines, as you mentioned, it takes up resources away from students, but it also makes, makes those of us that are in customer support, student support, very anxious when we’re dealing with Somebody we can’t see they’re not in person. And so we constantly, we, you know, I’m the assistant director here of technology services, those people on our help desk that are answering student calls constantly going, Wait, is this really that person? Does this voice match the the whatever, of the demographics of that student’s name, the student’s profile, all of those things. And so we’re making judgment calls over a phone call Yeah, that you don’t want to be doing, and we really don’t want to Yeah. And so we’re, we’re having to push students and for additional information, and, you know, maybe ask some personal, relatively personal information, but everything else is available to anybody that has any information about you.

Brent Warner 6:57
Yeah, so that’s rough,

Tim Van Norman 6:59
and so we’re constantly looking for to protect the students. And really, that’s what it is. And so this is the type of thing that causes that issue, is we’re trying to protect the students. And legitimately and understandably, students often get upset, because how come you’re asking my name, my phone number, my cell phone number, my this, and I, you know, all of these things. Why are you asking me so many questions? Well, because something about it doesn’t sound right, and would me, I’d rather have you asked me 20 Questions. I know it’s me, but that’s because I’ve been through this a bunch of times.

Brent Warner 7:39
Yeah, yeah,

Tim Van Norman 7:40
a 20 year old student hasn’t

Brent Warner 7:43
That’s right, yeah. And we have a lot of people enrolling, you know, or a lot of lot of fake, fake students, right, enrolling. We have some numbers. It’s a big number, right?

Tim Van Norman 7:54
Yeah, some of these numbers. Well, first of all, it’s always hard to know for sure which numbers are completely accurate, but some of the numbers we’ve seen have been upwards of 50% of the applications over time are suspicious. Some of the latest numbers I’ve seen are some colleges are 26% that it’s finally dropped a little bit after covid That, and those have already been processed through other systems. And finally, now they get to us, to our district, and now we’re still seeing 26% are suspicious, and of that, another 10 or of that probably close to 10% actually find out our fraud.

Brent Warner 8:44
Yeah, well, and then this article lots of numbers, yeah. I mean, and to kind of you know, percentages can be one thing, but also, like you found this article at LA, times 1.2 million fake students applied to California Community Colleges last year, and it said scammers stole more than $10 million in financial aid right through all these things. And so it’s like, whoo, that is happening, right? That is really happening a lot there. So so we know there’s a problem. We understand that there are things going on here. But we also, we wanted to talk about some things, though. Tim, so like, once we’re in our class and we’re starting to see, like, hey, this has happened. This is maybe happening. Is this? Is this student really the student that they claim to be? I’m a little bit suspicious. What are some of the things that maybe a teacher, just the average teacher, right? Like, I might be a little bit more connected with the IT team on campus. And I’m like, quick to like, hey, let’s, let’s figure this out, right? And we kind of do some things, but, but most teachers are like, are like, Hey, I’m I’m freeway flying, I’m here and there. Like, what can I just do alone by my you know, like on my own, you know, the little bit of time that I have during lunch and Trent transition, or whatever else it is, what are some some things maybe that people could do?

Tim Van Norman 9:57
So the first thing I would say is, if. Something feels off, then look into it. Okay, if something, if this is the same thing you’re seeing over and over again, and it’s just like everybody else’s posts, that might not be something that you really want to spend the time looking into, because every time you look into something, it’s going to take more time, and so don’t want you to not do your job, but do understand you only have 24 hours in a day, yeah. And so you’ve got to be you do have to be cautious and not spend too much time on this stuff. I say that because my tendency would be to spend, oh, I think this is wrong. I’m going to spend three hours investigating it. So the first thing I would say is, if something feels off, number one, you can do some quick checks. So in Canvas, for instance, Course Analytics, you can click on the student, and then when you click on the student, one of the options gives you the the students weekly online activity, and you can see one of the standard things that we’ve seen is a lot of these bots, or a lot of these people who are fraudulent. They’re only going if they’re doing anything, they’re only going to the assignments, assignments, discussions, quizzes, that type of thing. They’re only doing those. They’re not looking at course content at all. Yeah.

Brent Warner 11:30
Okay. So I am currently in here looking at one of my students, one of the students who I know, who’s like, you know, he’s spending time reading, reading the content to make sure he understands, and then he’s going in doing the work, right? I know, I know the student fairly well, and so, you know, I’m looking at his information, and I see when I go in, it does take a few clicks to look around, if you’ve never been in course analytics, so take a little time. It’s actually pretty amazing and a little scary, but, you know, but we’re trusting ourselves to be, you know, good, faithful users of this information. But like, we can see pretty, pretty deep into like, hey, what pages have you looked at? How many page views have you done on this? Which files have loaded on your side? And so, you know, then we can see like, hey, how much, you know, I don’t think it shows how long they’re spending on each page. That detail is not there, which, again, would probably help at some level if you’re really searching for this problem. But you can get a sense of like, hey, are they even looking at any other pages other than the activities or the graded assignments, right? And so. So it might actually also be a a hint to a teacher designing pages is like, Hey, have some content only pages, because a lot of teachers also do like, hey, everything’s inside of the assignment, and that’s where you’re going to find everything. Well, it’s like, okay, if you had one or two kind of smaller content pages before that, and then you had the activity kind of to wrap that up, that might give a sense of our students accessing all the things they need to have, or are they just only in the one activity page? Right?

Tim Van Norman 13:09
And remember, this can also be the student who’s struggling, and you’re looking to see why they’re struggling, and you see that they’re never they’re only going into assignments, maybe. So it’s not just about fraud, but it does give you some good insights. So to look at where to see if students actually are spending time in your class, you can often take a look at people, and even if you don’t have it enabled for the rest of your class, and then that’ll give you on the right hand side, it gives you a column that says the time spent in the class. Now, at the beginning of the class, you might not see very much, but a month in, you’ll see some students have spent 10 minutes in the class, and other students have spent 10 hours.

Brent Warner 13:53
Yeah, I kind of do that every once in a while, and like, there’s a pretty legit connection between success in classes, and how long you see them spending inside of there, right? Like, it’s not always true. It’s not always the case, right? But, like, but I do peek at those every once in a while. And, like, I don’t want it to be my guiding, you know, choices on anything, but at the same time, I’m like, okay, you know you’re doing fine. You’ve already spent, you know, 15 hours inside of here. Things are good, right? Like, you’re probably on track. And then some other student comes up and says, Well, I really tried this and this and this. And I’m like, Yeah, but I only see that you’ve spent 20 minutes total since the beginning of the semester actually logged in and doing anything. So what’s up with that? Right? And then it’s like, okay, right? So, so again, that’s not about necessarily a fraudulent student, but it’s an insight into what’s going on a fraudulent student? Though, it might be the same kind of thing where you’re like, hey, I don’t you know I am seeing that you are not, not really spending time in here, but the way that this class is built, there needs to be time spent reviewing this information. Absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 14:59
Another. Thing that you can do is, in your assignments, in your quizzes, especially, ask questions out of the content in your class. Okay, have them refer to that content, because if they’re not reading the content, they’re not going to have a reference. Yeah. So it can, it can encourage the legitimate student to actually do the work.

Brent Warner 15:25
Yeah, yeah, that one i Right now I’m okay with that, but I am less and less because, you know, like, the AI can just go in and scan the whole thing and just be like, Okay, let’s figure out what’s going on, right? So, right. So yes, and be aware that there’s a pretty big caveat on top of that. So, oh, and there’s

Tim Van Norman 15:41
always going to be, you know, you’ll get some students who only, only work on the assignments, and it’s completely legit student, and when they struggle, they’ll take a look back at the at the work too. So you never know. One of the other cool things is metadata. Word Google Docs, yeah, they’ll draft back process feedback. We’ll do the same, a lot of that too. But even just in Google Docs, if you don’t have one of the other things, you can just take a look and see the history of how that Google doc was written.

Brent Warner 16:17
Yeah, yeah. So if you’re going back and looking at that hit that history of everything, you can go and click on the little backwards time clock arrow, and it tells you, like, I’m looking at our show notes right now. I only have to hover that I said last set. It was made four minutes ago by Tim Van Norman, right so like you’re going in right in there. But you can also click on tools up in the toolbar at the top, and you can go scroll down under the bottom of tools, and there’s one that says activity dashboard. And so inside of there, you can see, so this is on Google Docs, but you can see like, hey, who has accessed this information, who has access this file, and who’s been doing it? So okay, if it’s only the one person, it’s not as a clear it’s not 100% it’s not foolproof, but it’s something that kind of says, Hey, are my, you know, I my spidey senses came up. Let me just check on it. Let me see if there’s one thing going on here. The other part, though, to Tim, since you mentioned that metadata is, if you have students uploading PDFs, for example, you can probably go and look at some of the Get Info on a Mac you call it’s called the Get Info on Windows or whatever. You can kind of see that little file of all the information, and it will give you some information about it. And if that’s like, changing for the student, right? So it’s like, hey, this was, you know, made on this type of computer, and then it was made on a different type of computer, and then it was made on a different, you know, like, or whatever data you’re looking at, right? You know, there might be little parts inside of there, some of them, sometimes these files tell you, like location information, right? Where do they come from? Where you know whatever else it is. And so I’m not encouraging people to spend a lot of time policing, right? Like you mentioned earlier, this is not the goal. But if you’re getting towards high levels of suspicion, if you’re getting towards the point where you’re talking about or thinking about, you know, reporting this student, take a couple extra steps. Just say, Hey, do I have anything to back this up? Is it purely my bias, or is there a little bit of, you know, actual evidence? Maybe that is inside of there helping you out as well.

Tim Van Norman 18:22
To that point, if you do, if you do, submit a report for a suspicious student, you want to have that information to give to them. So it’s not like you’re wasting your time, but it can really make a difference. So let’s talk about submitting a report. It depends on where you are and especially your relationship with people. But like at Irvine Valley, we regularly, like today, get get people who ask, Hey, can you take a look at this student? Something doesn’t look right, and the more information you give us, the better. But understand much of what we see, we cannot tell you, right? Yeah, private information. So if you get a message back that says, you know, I would recommend that you submit a report to the formal report to the Dean of Students with the information that you have found, and feel free to suggest that they contact us. That’s a sign. That might be a sign. But what we can do is go through and as happened today, we had a student who submitted somebody else’s work in an email. When we took a look, we realized that there was actually two assignments. One the assignment that they had submitted their own work to an assignment. Then there was a second assignment that was actually a discussion. That everybody submitted to, and it looks like they downloaded somebody else’s discussion and accidentally included that in an email to the teacher.

Brent Warner 20:11
So, like, an innocent mistake, right? Like working with information they were provided in class, all these type of stuff. So yeah, this is great because, like, you also want to recognize, like, hey, everything that’s suspicious isn’t actually a suspicious thing, right? Like it could just be a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation of what happened, right?

Tim Van Norman 20:30
And so that it gives another set of eyes before it raises up to a high level. And by the way, that also can be we we use Proctorio. I know there’s a lot of places that are against it and all that, but if somebody, if that raises your if your spidey senses are off and you think something’s wrong, often something like that will calm it down or or validate your concern. So do think about those things. Understand also, when you submit a report, at least at Irvine Valley, we’ve got two different levels. One is a formal submission and one’s an informal submission. If you aren’t convinced it’s not a bad thing to do an informal Yeah, something doesn’t look right. I don’t know what it is. You know, can, can somebody just document this? The reason I say that is because while you might have an informal, somebody else might have an informal, you get four or five informals going on. There’s something’s not, not good, okay?

Brent Warner 21:40
It’s the pattern starts showing up, right,

Tim Van Norman 21:42
exactly, and so especially if maybe there’s informals across the semester, or something like that. So don’t be afraid to just say something doesn’t feel right. I’ve documented what I can. I don’t know if it’s fraud or not. I don’t know if the student’s cheating, you know, yeah, it doesn’t feel right

Brent Warner 22:03
with those informal ones, like, students aren’t notified, right? Like they’re not getting in trouble for it. There’s, it’s not on their record. It’s not on their record, nothing like that. It’s just kind of off to the side. It’s a little like, Oh, okay. Like, one time, two times, fine, seven times, eight times. Hold, on a second, right? So, so, yeah. So these are, these are some of the things that people can do. I know that they’re, you know, everybody might have their own different ideas on things, but I always like to come back to this idea of like, you know, be generous with your students, be thoughtful towards them. But also like, you know, what is that old Trust, but verify, right? Is what we’re also talking

Tim Van Norman 22:43
about, absolutely. And understand that there’s a lot of tools that you don’t have access to that other people do. For instance, there’s ways of taking a look at the actual address of the computer that the students using when they’re submitting work. Oh, yeah. Okay. And so now we can see that, oh, these three students were at the same address at the same time. What’s up with that? Or the student is submitting from this class from China and this class from California, you know, and there’s a lot of patterns that we can see, but we can’t even tell you that that’s the case. Yeah. So that’s where the Dean of Students can come in and and well, and get a hold of the right people to help do an investigation should they need to. So don’t, don’t be afraid. But also, what I’ve seen is probably 50% of the cases were not fraud, or were were questionable. And then I would say 50% were questionable at first, but then over time, often the teachers, the teacher either said, Oh, okay, now I realize it’s not, or the teacher was proved out is, yeah, something was wrong. You’ve got experience doing this. Trust your gut,

Brent Warner 24:13
yeah, well, and also, like, the truth is, it puts your mind to ease when you know, when someone at a higher up level says, No, this is all okay. And you’re like, okay, good, right? Like, you actually feel a lot better about it, too. Instead of that kind of anxiety you’re carrying around, you’re like, Oh, God, I hope this is you know thing, right? So, like, so finding out that it’s not fraught, and like, having spent the time to go check it out and figure it out, and then finding out your suspicions are wrong tends to be a relaxing, you know, not relaxing but, but puts you at ease.

Tim Van Norman 24:47
So And do remember, don’t take this personally. Yeah, I know I say that, and I do, you know, do as I say, not as I do, right, right? You know, it feels. Personal. But the reality is, it’s not they’re not doing if there is something going on, they’re not doing it to you personally.

Brent Warner 25:07
Yeah, absolutely fair enough. So hopefully some of these tips help everybody out. You know, a few little things that you can do, a little a few quick moves just to check on, things that maybe you’re not aware of. Try them out again. Hopefully you don’t have too many of these. We know we just wanted to talk about something a little different today, a little you know, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about AI recently. We know we’re not done talking about AI, but, but there are other issues in the world of tech besides AI, believe it or not, and so, so yeah, take those tips, use them as you will, and we’ll be back more with with more in the future.

Tim Van Norman 25:49
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at the higher ed tech podcast.com as

Brent Warner 26:00
always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts

Tim Van Norman 26:07
for everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by our office or Visit or contact me. Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 26:22
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 26:28
I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 26:29
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.