There are plenty of online schools already. They usually either have you take tests at a local third party testing center, or they watch you through your webcam while you take tests.
Additionally there's plenty of cheating going on in traditional universities. I've even heard of people being paid to take entire classes for other people.
Agreed. If you're going to cheat, you'll cheat. It might even be easier to detect, e.g. enrollment and registration coming from one IP, but all coursework submissions happening from another. Or other more subtle detection mechanisms could be developed I'm sure.
Taking the big tests at third party testing centers should be the way to go.
However, I would like to point out that an university does not merely comprise of lectures. The research projects, internships and even the interaction with peers cannot be recreated online. Traditional universities still have an edge over this.
If enrollment was high enough, local meetups for some classes would go a long way towards solving this problem.
What I would like to see eventually happen is for learning and credentialing to separate.
I'd like to see a university that was more freeform. What if instead of just offering 4 year degrees, you could take a 6 month AI program, or a 3 month probability and stats course.
I imagine your concern is "how can an employer know this cert means anything?" The short answer is they can't, employers should stop filtering on presence of degree/cert/buzzword. For the jobs where certain certs might matter in a legal sense (certain areas of civics engineering I'm sure) I would hope they vet candidates above and beyond presence of the cert and knowledge of the most basic facts.
In practice, the result of cheating for a degree is the same as lying on a job application or resume. When the person gets hired for a job in that field their performance will make that job short-lived (if they're genuinely bad). Similar for putting a school and degree they didn't go to on their resume just to get hired. If they really don't know the material, their performance will show and worst-case the company lost six months of time they could have spent taking someone else through the hiring process. (Ed: okay, worst case is that the person's incompetence causes them to blow up the Earth on the first task they're given.)
If they do know the material, and their job performance is good, do you really care that they cheated for the degree or lied about having gotten it? (Okay, it pegs their honesty level quite a bit and you should definitely start bolting things to the floor, but if they do the work well they're still a valuable bee and you can keep them on while looking for someone else if it's morally offensive enough to you.)
