Abstract:

The Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have researching and teaching as their missions. For most institutions, teaching, in particular, is the core of the HEI activity. Class teaching is mostly executed on a classroom, in which a professor lectures students; the student’s evaluation, typically, is also executed at the end of the semester as finals written exams; and the certification is still provided to students as paper credential documents.

With the introduction of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), the HEI have struggled to incorporate this new technology in their business models, and most have adopted some sort of Learning Management System (LMS). LMS are used by HEI mostly in e-learning or b-leaning models, in which the students have access to the learning contents and some online activities. The evaluation activities are supported by several LMS technological mechanisms in order to assure the quality of the evaluation regarding the possibility of electronic fraud. From a pedagogical perspective, there are also several mechanisms that professors can use to design the evaluation process in order to prevent specific types of frauds. Both of this mechanisms, technological and pedagogical, have their limitations. So, generally, HEI are still requiring the physical presence of the students for the evaluation actions at the end of the semester.

UTAD is part of a HEI consortium that is providing training classes in an e-learning model, in which the students’ evaluation requires the physical presence. The HEI consortium has a general objective of providing evaluation activities in any of the consortium HEI, independently of the students’ HEI of origin. That way, the student can go through the learning process on-line, using the LMS, and attend the evaluation activities at the HEI geographically more conveniently located.

To fulfil the objective previously stated, the HEI consortium is creating a set of specific rooms with the sole purpose of supporting the evaluation of elearning students. These rooms are located in each one of the HEI, and equipped with thin personal computers (PC) connected to a local server. These PCs and server will run a customized version of the operating system, in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) model, providing a controlled and safe infrastructure for the usage of the LMS to execute the evaluation activities. To setup an evaluation activity, a professor must create the evaluation activity in his HEI course LMS.

In a preliminary version of the evaluation rooms, it is being created one room in each one of the consortium HEI. The LMS widely used by the consortium HEI is Moodle, together with the Safe Exam browser. On the current setup, a PC in the evaluation room will load a specific VDI image, according to the student profile. That image includes a single application, the Safe Exam browser, which provides a user interface of a single window with exclusively access to the user LMS exam.

These rooms and the PCs infrastructure are technically designed to minimize the risk of fraud.

The inter HEI agreements will be rendered into a set of rules and a certification process will be designed in order to have a standard level of service across all the rooms. Together with the certification process it will also be defined an audit process in order to regularly verify the compliance of the rooms with the previously designed certification standard.