TeSLA project provides to educational institutions, an adaptive trust e-assessment system for assuring e-assessment processes in online and blended environments. It will support both continuous and final assessment to improve the trust level across students, teachers and institutions. The system is being developed taking into account quality assurance agencies in education, privacy and ethical issues and educational and technological requirements throughout Europe. TeSLA project follows the interoperability standards for integration into different Learning environment systems (LMS) providing a scalable and adapting solution.
TeSLA is a three years duration project (Y2016-Y2018). By the moment we have passed the middle of the project reaching a maturity and readiness level of the system that allows it to be tested by more than the seven academic institutions from the consortium, new institutions will take part of the second round of the third pilot. You can watch a practical video of how TeSLA works on https://vimeo.com/164079524
TeSLA project is categorized as an innovation action within the European Commission and its Horizon 2020 program. Online education has evolved so quickly in these last twenty years since the decade of the 90’s when the first online training courses started in the so-called eLearning 1.0 until today.
If eLearning 1.0 was focused on static web pages that only offered proprietary content, the change of millennium (year 2000) brought us the revolution of eLearning 2.0 which began to dazzle us with the first wikis, blogs, podcast where timidly students and teachers began to exchange information and knowledge among them.
Starting in the year 2010, new technologies in mobility and the tremendous rise of social networks gave a new impetus to Online training, thus creating the eLearning 3.0 concept, where for the first time the student is at the center of education and his/her satisfaction plays a key role.
The contents are now dynamic and the interaction among all the members of the learning community is crucial for the enrichment of all of us. The concept of Flipped classroom (2007) takes now its maximum meaning here.
Anyway, even today many institutions are still in a 2.0 education model. A proof of this, talking about inter-operability, for instance, is the massive use of the SCORM standard when, for years, there are new standards recognized by the IMS consortium, such as TinCan (xAPI), more powerful and complete.
The horizon 2020 opens a new door to a new educational and revolutionary model; the eLearning 4.0.
Inside eLearning scope, the eAssessment evolution comes by the hand of the need of both, the educator and the student to go one step beyond. In order to get the alignment and strengthen in terms of technology and social evolution, new systems for this purpose are growing up, TeSLA system, in order to attend these needs and evolution, breaking social physic and geographical barriers allowing students to carry out tests at any time, in any part of the world.
In this context, institutions will use not only a traditional LMS, but also an entire learning ecosystem, where mobility, statistics and predictive analysis, personalized learning paths, gamification and of course, trust e-assessments authorship tools will be the pillars to settle down the future of eLearning.
Nowadays, only the most visionary and innovative institutions are facing these challenges in order to make the leap to the world of 4.0. In this context, TeSLA project is the model to follow to promote and raise awareness of the way in which the world learns and makes eLearning 4.0 a reality.
The most innovative technology regarding e-Assessment in Online education has been developed for TeSLA project, setting the basis of development in this ambit of eLearning.
TeSLA system provides eAssessment with a series of authentication and recognition instruments for students taking the exam, as innovative elements for this evolution for These instruments are:
TeSLA system will use these instruments to verify authentication and authorship during local and remote examinations. For authentication, the available instruments cover face detection and verification, voice verification and keystroke dynamics. Face presentation attack detection (FPAD) and voice presentation attack detection (VPAD) assist the face detection and verification instrument as well as the voice verification instrument in detecting cheating attempts. For the authorship verification, a plagiarism detection instrument (PACPlagi) and an authorship recognition instrument are available. All of those instruments combined will allow a reasonable indication if the student and his document are authentic or not.
The system is also being developed taking into account privacy issues in order to provide a secured platform ensuring the identity of both teachers and students. This is leading to personal data being processed by this platform which will collect those data to identify the users (students, teacher, etc) and process the information to guarantee the identity of these users and reduce as much as possible any cheating during the examination.
TeSLA system makes disappear security and privacy disadvantages and barriers of on-line evaluation systems. TeSLA system also exceeds the requirements and advantages of online examination systems, covering the gaps that other online examination or eAssessment systems have.
TeSLA system follows the interoperability standards for integration into a different learning environment and it is being developed to reduce the current restrictions of time and physical space in teaching and learning, which opens up new opportunities for learners with physical or mental disabilities as well as respecting social and cultural differences.
TeSLA consortium is composed of Higher Education institutions and research centers in collaboration with technological companies as well as accrediting quality agencies. It is formed by 18 partners: 8 universities, 3 quality agencies, 4 research centers and 3 companies.
This geographical distribution of Tesla partners has eased the geographical diversity for implementation of TeSLA’s first pilots taking place in different countries around Europe. Given the innovative action of the project, the current gap in e-assessment and the growing number of institutions interested in offering online education, the project will conduct large-scale pilots to evaluate and assure the reliability of the TeSLA system.
Different dissemination actions, communication activities have been carried out during project life by consortium members in order to introduce the project not only around Europe but around the world.
TeSLA Project is led by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). This institution not only manages day by day the project but pushes data privacy, dissemination, technical, legal, quality aspects covered by the project. UOC has also contributed to the project with indispensable tools as conceptual maps, anti- plagiarism instrument, etc…
FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNION
TeSLA is not responsible for any contents linked or referred to from these pages. It does not associate or identify itself with the content of third parties to which it refers via a link. Furthermore TESLA is not liable for any postings or messages published by users of discussion boards, guest books or mailing lists provided on its page. We have no control over the nature, content and availability of any links that may appear on our site. The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.
TeSLA is coordinated by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 ICT Programme. This website reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.