Abstract:

Over the last ten years, e-learning has played a vital role in education. A leading Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) reports a user base of 70 million students and 1.2 million teachers across 7.5 million courses. Whilst e-learning has introduced flexibility and remote/distance-based learning, there are still aspects of course delivery that rely upon traditional approaches. The most significant of these is examinations. Students are still required to attend physical testing centers in order to ensure strict examination conditions are applied. Whilst research has begun to propose solutions in this respect, they fundamentally fail to provide the integrity required.

This paper presents an analysis of invigilation and e-assessment solutions. A core framework for an e-assessment system has been developed based upon maintaining student convenience but providing effective verification of participants throughout the test, rather than merely at the beginning. Transparent or non-intrusive identity verification is utilized to conveniently capture and process biometric signals, which has the potential to facilitate continuous verification. This novel e-invigilation system is designed in a modular fashion to incorporate a range of behavioral and physiological biometrics including: face recognition, keystroke analysis, mouse dynamics, linguistic analysis and iris recognition. This range of techniques provides an opportunity to capture biometric samples under a range of differing examination scenarios (e.g. essay writing, multiple choice test). The key to user acceptance is usability and the system has been designed to specifically ensure ease of use for all users.

Keywords:

e-assessment, e-invigilation, e-learning, biometric.