I've given several presentations this term (and watched several dozen more!) about academic integrity in online teaching. This post is some of the thoughts which became my recent presentation on the subject at the Actuarial Research Conference. You can find the video of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IL2a7L1WEw and slides attached to this post.

First of all, cheating is not necessarily higher in online courses just because they are online. Cheating has many causes, including students being stressed, feeling like they are unable to succeed without it, not seeing the value in the assessments, or simply not knowing the rules. It's important to create the conditions where cheating is less likely to occur, rather than just trying to chase down every offense (or worse, tempting students to do so and punishing them when they do.)

Some ways you can reduce the causes of cheating include:

• Have some assessments where collaboration is not just allowed but encouraged (discussion board topics for each question, etc), and some where it is not allowed (individual work only) and make the distinction clear.
• Make any individual assessment open-book and specify exactly what that means (e.g. anything on the course website or discussion board but nowhere else.) The reason for this is if you say don't use anything, many will break that rule and then once they've broken one rule it's easier to break more. Whereas if you give them a reasonable amount of resources, they're much more likely to stick within those parameters.
• Similarly, allow students to ask questions (privately) to clarify during the assessment. If they feel completely stuck and can't even begin, it's more temptation to look/ask elsewhere.
• The questions on an open-book assessment should still be a wide range of difficulty levels, including some relatively easy ones. If all the questions are super-hard, it will be more incentive to cheat. But if there are some that they can easily get on their own, they're more likely to keep trying. Also definitely include questions that test higher levels of learning (ask them to analyze, evaluate, and create rather than just memorize, understand, and apply.)
• Make your assessments authentic and valuable - something they might need to do in the workplace or later careers. Connect your assessments to what is going on in the students' school, city, country, and in the news. If they see the relevance and importance of what you are asking them to do, they are more likely to take it seriously and give it an honest shot.

There will always be people who try to cheat, and these are the same people that would (for example) write cheat notes on their own body and then go to the bathroom to check them. You'll never prevent every case. But the vast majority of people will be honest if your expectations of them are reasonable and you minimize the temptation. It's important to let students know that too - if they think everyone else is cheating, they will just to keep up. But a lot of research shows that most people don't.

If you do have concerns about a subset of students cheating, you could do a follow-up Oral Exam (see my other talk about this!) or other methods. But when addressing cheating once it has occurred, your response should focus on pedagogy over punishment. Your goal is for students to learn, and if you can give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they have, and have learned and grown from mistakes they have made, that is a win.