Student A
  “When it was time for students to apply for new lectures for next semester, I was looking for some recommended OCU lectures, and I was interested in one of them and took it. Online lectures were good for me because I didn’t need to go to the classroom and I was able to take the class whenever I wanted to, but sometimes I just opened it on my laptop while doing other things, so I was kind of distracted.”
Student B
  “My friends asked me to take OCU classes together, so out of curiosity I started to take one OCU class. It was comfortable for me to take it because I could take it at home whenever I wanted to, but when we took exams, I thought that professors couldn’t supervise us because it’s an online lecture, and I was kind of worried if there were students who cheated.”
  OCU started at Sungkyunkwan University and 12 other prominent universities in 1997. However, there are some problems arising among students nowadays.
  An OCU consortium is a consultative group that has academic exchanges with other universities via cyberspace. CBNU is also a member of the OCU consortium, and today, there are 19 national universities, including CBNU, and 29 private universities, including Chungang and Sungkyunkwan Universities, so 48 universities are members of the OCU consortium.
  In the OCU, about 280 lectures are provided annually on average. Most of them are normally liberal arts, which have a variety of contents such as certificates, computer, languages, state exams, arts, or physical education. According to the OCU consortium, the number of students who have taken OCU lectures was 99,035 in 2013, 107,381 in 2014, and 113,710 in 2015, so the number of students has increased. In the case of CBNU, there were 349 students in 2013, 711 in 2014, and 1,872 in 2015. One of the managers in the OCU consortium said, “Actually, we don’t promote a certain college, but CBNU might often encourage lots of students to take OCU lectures as a prominent university along with other universities.”
  These days, however, the complaining voices by students about OCU lectures are growing louder among students. Because of the characteristic that OCU lectures are served online, there are lots of students who abuse it and plagiarize. As OCU lectures are taken in lots of universities, most students can easily find and share some information about exams on online web sites, but because of this, students wonder if it is just a lecture for getting good grades easily or not. Hong Ye-jin (’15, Dept. of Food Science & Biotechnology) said, “One of the most serious problems about OCU lectures, I think, is that students just take them to get good scores. People can easily get previous exams on some web sites, so I just took it unavoidably considering about that fact.” Another student, Park Jong-hyeon, (’13, School of Business) said, “I’ve heard that students just take same OCU lectures together to share information for good grades. I’m pretty sure  that there will be more benefits when students take the same classes together than when they don’t, but I think that if those behaviors, like sharing exam tips and helping each other, give an unfair advantage, students who take OCU classes alone would feel bad about that and they would think it’s unfair.”
  CBNU Professor Kim Yeong-hui (Dept. of Child Welfare) who teaches ‘Marriage and Family’ said about OCU problems, “Because OCU lectures are only taken online, even if there are some systems that can manage plagiarism, it will be hard to control all of them. I think the least thing I could do is that I should believe in students’ consciences. OCU classes’ exams are not implemented in real classrooms like other classes, but professors try to assign quizzes, reports, or debate homework to students to evaluate each student’s achievements. As for me, I try to make difficult problems on my exams. In my opinion, however, when there are some students who don’t take exams or who don’t submit homework for some reason and then send me e-mails which have excuses about those things, I shouldn’t condone them. That’s the only thing I feel sad about.”
  One of the OCU consortium managers said that they are dealing with some problems of OCU lectures by making various institutions. “Actually, there are some problems of OCU lectures as an aspect of being online, so we are trying to make some solutions. For example, we made a program which protects students from opening other web sites while they are taking an exam or a program which makes PCs with the same IP address unable to interact. In addition, we have made rules about exams and encourage professors to follow those rules. For instance, professors should make various types of problems so that they are not duplicated, or professors should make some problems which have more than 1 correct answer. They should also make descriptive problems so that it is easy to find students who write the same answers. If  they write the same answers, they will get disadvantages. We also have a complaint forum on our website to hear students’ complaints.
  Even though there are quite a few problems with OCU lectures, the number of students who take them is still growing. The OCU consortium claims that we provide students with differentiated and superb education, and we are trying to improve our services for students every single day. One OCU manager said, “We are trying to develop our lecture quality. When professors open new lectures, we see 4 corrective steps : a good assessment of the lecture, the teaching process, the college operation and finally the contents of the lecture. We also give some benefits for students. For example, a lot of students are learning English, so we affiliate with a foreign language academy, ‘Siwon-School’, and give a discount to students from that academy who take OCU lectures. We are also trying to renovate our web site.”

By Oh Byung-hyun
Bh37@cbnu.ac.kr