You can easily reach today’s educational institutions with the expansion of the availability of the massive open online courses. It provides a wider range of educational resources not only to the already enrolled students but also to people who are not able to gain access to a campus due to scheduled constraints or issues related to location.
Regardless of the location, a student is currently able to take courses by using a computer where knowledge is delivered via various types of multimedia content rather than taking courses in a typical classroom in a university.
As per a recent survey, even by the year 2013, in the United States of America, more than 7.1 million students were taking at least one online course. The very same survey has stated that around 70% of the higher educational institutions were then of the belief that online education is a critical component of their long term strategy.
Undoubtedly, in any educational program, exams play a crucial part and as such, they become critical components: online exams are not an exception. In any exam, there remains a possibility of cheating and as such its detection and prevention should be of paramount significance.
It should also be noted that the educational credentials must be in a position to reflect the actual learning in order to retain their value to the society. Meanwhile, researchers note that the percentage of students who may commit activities related to academic cheating has been on the rise. In 2013, approximately 74% of students had indicated that they found that cheating in online exams is relatively easy.
Also in the very same year, the researchers found that nearly 25% of the students admitted to have cheated in online exams. As the exams are administered in a conventional and proctored classroom environment, throughout the exam, the candidates are monitored by a human proctor. In contrast, finding a convenient way to have the service of a human proctor in online exams is not possible.
MOOC
Consequently, no reliable way is ensured against cheating. In the absence of the ability of having the Proctor online exams in a reliable, convenient and inexpensive manner, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers find it rather difficult to give a reasonable assurance that the students have learned the relevant material which is one of the key outcomes of any educational program, including the online education as well.
There are typical testing procedures that can be applied with the online learners and that includes: students come to an on campus or university certified testing center where they take up the exam under human proctoring.
New emerging technologies such as Examity and ProctorU allow the students to take their test from anywhere in the world as long as they do not complain on the internet connection. However, the students still rely on a person “watching” exam taking.
For instance, you can see that Examity employs a human proctor watching a test candidate through a webcam from a remote location. In this aspect, as the proctors are trained to watch and listen for any type of suspicious behaviour of the test candidate, they are able to alert the test candidate or even abruptly stop the test.
The identity of the test candidate as well as the integrity of the test is ensured by proctoring. The key objective of any proctoring is to ensure that the test candidate is prevented from letting someone set in his place and prevent cheating during the course of the exam.
Through the online proctoring systems, the proctors are able to monitor the online test candidates during the entire testing set via webcams, screen sharing, microphones etc. Real time proctoring,controlled proctoring and recorded proctoring are some of the online proctoring systems.
A proctor in a real time proctored session monitors a limited number of test candidates located remotely by using screen sharing tools capabilities and video conferencing. Without any scheduling difficulties, a recorded proctoring session can individually be scheduled.
Also, audio, video and screen share feeds of the test candidate are recorded during the test where these recordings can be played back at a later time. In order to control and manage larger online test sessions, specialized proctoring systems have lately been used. Generally, the online proctoring process begins with the proctor’s verification of the identity of the test candidate via their webcam.
Afterwards, the proctor asks all the candidates to move their webcams around in order to physically scan the entire environment.
Meanwhile, the proctor makes sure that the test candidate does not possess any unpermitted items such as smartphones, notes, notepads, books and so on. Also, the proctor informs the test candidates that unethical behaviour is not permitted during the test.
Secure browser
Apart from that the proctor makes sure that he disables all the unwanted functionalities from the computer of the test candidate such as pasting, switching tasks, copying, printing, taking screenshots, accessing other applications etc. In offering its online certification exams, for instance, Microsoft uses its own secure proctoring system. It is clear that Microsoft uses a secure browser that shuts down all the applications except the test delivery system.
Apart from that, they make sure that many keyboard functionalities are also made disabled. Meanwhile, the system also issues alerts if any suspicious actions such as eye movement, head movement; strange sounds and so on are detected.
Online proctoring in education is not a new area of research. A lot of universities and institutions were using proctoring systems for online courses even prior to the pandemic. The competitive and adaptive exams such as GRE, GMAT, and CAT are predominantly proctor based exams. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, around the world, both private and public sector organisations which can afford the cost of online proctored education have been taking the advantages of the online proctoring system.
But, as the pandemic was unexpected, it was rather difficult to continue the schooling from the very beginning of the pandemic due to the fact that almost all the businesses were expected to temporarily shut down.Despite that, since then, the schools have moved into online lessons: for learning assessments, online proctored education has risen.
One of the major challenges of online proctored education is the fact that the students living in remote areas find it rather difficult to have access to the internet. Also due to financial constraints, the students have a difficulty in affording the cost on devices such as tablets and laptops without which they are not able to join with online proctored education.
Ethics
This as such means that the students should have sophisticated devices for e-learning and online proctoring in education which will make them able to take part correctly in this process. Also, it is noted that online proctored education may even encourage weak personal ethics among the students and that would make them cheat in an open book exam.
Albeit, online proctored education lacks a strong classroom presence, an interaction and a deep connection between the students and the teacher, it is strongly believed that it could be used effectively and efficiently. Researchers are of the view that universities around the world should be willing to take up the challenge of making e-learning and online proctoring in education viable and stable in their institutions through deliberate efforts.
It is also noted that computer based assessments have got greater advantages than that of the traditional paper based examinations of all forms. In that context, in a shift to align with global digital development and requirements, it would be better, if universities could embrace the new norm and be globally relevant for quality assessment.