How do you stop online students cheating?

So was being bullied - my point was that using group projects as a method to prevent cheating is much less trivial than I think you were implying. Encouraging collaboration and communication is a good thing, but in my experience, there is still plenty of cheating.

Quit worrying about it. All cheaters get is a grade, or certification or diploma. Worry about teaching people. Worry about people learning. Quit measuring people.

People will cheat, and maybe they are great scam artists and will be able to cheat through the rest of their life. Those few and the others who screw themselves by not learning aren't worth being concerned with. Spend (all) your effort on those who want to learn.

The simple answer to the question, "How do you stop online students cheating?" is that you don't. You discard the idea of "cheating" altogether.

In days not so long past, rote learning was important because, in many professions, there was no way to access the source data within a reasonable amount of time within the arena where that information would be useful. A trip to the library in the middle of the workday was generally not feasible. Pausing to locating and consulting the correct medical textbooks in the middle of an operation was dangerous and could have proven fatal to the patient.

Contrast that with the current state of the world where, in the vast majority of cases, the answers to many questions and the solutions to many problems can be located within minutes or even seconds from a smartphone or tablet. Combine that with widespread wireless broadband access in the developed world and it becomes obvious that not only is rote memorization of many facts, figures, formulae, and so forth not needed, it may actually be counterproductive.

I say counterproductive because, due to the way university-level education works much of what you are learning, especially in technical disciplines, is obsolete by the time you learn it. That's not a swing at formal education, mind you. I'm not asserting that what is learned at a university is not useful. I'm asserting that by the time you memorize that information it is highly likely that some other development has arisen which either invalidates or supersedes what you just recorded.

What I believe would be more productive than online universities worrying about cheating would be to more aggressively time-limit their exams. Doing so would at least validate how quickly students are able to gather and synthesize information to arrive at correct conclusions - a skill set that will serve them well even in today's rapid-access-to-information world.

I would have said the same during my original undergraduate work (at 18-19). However, I ended up working full time and taking night classes with other working adults. From then on, there was never a coat tails problem. We would actually have the problem of people wanting to do too much rather than people not wanting to do anything.

You can't. Make people travel to a controlled place for examination if you need the certification, teach using online tools.

The real cost of University(specially in Europe where University is affordable, not like in the US) is living abroad most of the year. Making it 1% offline and 99% online is a good compromise.

Another possibility is asking your students real innovative work and make copying a must!!(organize people in working groups like in real life).