Ethical Decision-Making in e-Learning: A Socio-technical Analysis of Informal Security Controls

E-learning is emerging as a way of using technology to re-create a one-on-one learning environment for numerous participants at a time and has become prevalent in the higher education arena. In addition to traditional forms of cheating, many universities currently deal with issues of students in traditional classrooms who engage in technology-facilitated cheating. This paper recognizes the socio-technical dimension of security breaches in e-learning. E-learning fraud occurs in the social context of the class, virtual or traditional, and may involve influences by groups, teachers, other students, and the context of the overall university. Research states that when placed in a moral situation, individual behavior can be influenced by factors that are specific to the individual and factors that vary by situation. The focus of this paper is to develop propositions to help understand these behaviors and describe the results of an exploratory qualitative study to examine the perceptions of students in this context. We provide an analysis of this data and examine its utility in the development of future research in e-learning.