Abstract:

Once MOOCs revolutionized the education system by breaking in 2012, allowing anyone access to a high quality education for free, the next step that emerged in 2013 was the possibility of accessing Verified Courses, of this are benefit both students (who may demonstrate that it was him who took and completed the course) and MOOCs providers (representing a way for revenue as the certification are upon a small payment).

The new Verified Certificate MOOCs are a critical move forward for the MOOC movement in continuing to attract larger global audiences as they create viable affordable credential value for the serious MOOC students. Coursera was the first MOOC provider to launch five Verified Courses in 2013, since then the offer for Verified Courses has increased considerably and almost every MOOC provider has some.

Next step coming, providers want to move on MOOC curricula, that is not just single verified courses but a sequence of massive open online verified courses, prescribing defined pathways. This is the direction that MOOCs want to move in their evolutionary process to make them more interesting to penetrate the traditional system of credits and degrees. Provider edX is the first pushing with Xseries curricula.

This way providing value for course completion by ensuring that the student is who he says he is gets even more critical.
In Smowltech we collected these new concerns in the market to develop a specific service that incorporates all these features. We analyzed what are the characteristics necessary for a system to be suitable for this massive verification: highly scalable, automatic, affordable, with few hardware and software requirements for the user, passive for the student.

We were able to adapt our SMOWL system to meet all these features and offer a continuous authentication service specific for this particular sector:
• High scalability: cloud-based (SaaS) solution.
• Automatic: the student takes three photos when registering into the system: two photos to create the biometrical facial model and a third one with the student ID. From then on photos are taken automatically and randomly by the system during the session and compared with the model.
• Price flexibility: by monitoring from a single session up to the total number of sessions of a course.
• Few requirements: Hardware (basic webcam); Software (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera or IE; pluging Adobe Flash Player)

Our SMOWL system for continuous verifying online student identity can help MOOC providers in their objective to be awarded credit by Quality Educational Agencies for their courses by seeking traceability of evidence of student authenticity. MOOC providers will be able to give recognition to the person who really did the work.

Keywords:

Identity verification, certified, MOOC.