clipped from: www.pbs.org   
your students are more comfortable organizing their own online discussions than most of us ever will, so you better lay out the rules as specifically and openly as possible. And when students break those rules, the punishment should match the severity of the academic crime committed. Otherwise, you too could find your school in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The lesson to be learned from this mess is that schools need to get a better grasp of how students create and use online study groups. They need to understand the spectrum of activities that can take place in them, from innocent - even productive - collaboration activities to organized cheating. Participating in an online study group isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s how the group is used that should taken into consideration. If a school’s acceptable use policy and academic rules in general don’t address a student’s rights and responsibilities when it comes to online study groups, they need to be re-examined.