The 7^th NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON E-LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION will be held on 20-23 September, 2018 in Borovets, Bulgaria. This is one of the largest national scientific forums in the field of e-learning where recognized experts, lecturers, researchers and PhD students from over 15 Bulgarian universities will take part. The conference covers a wide range of topics: Methodological and theoretical aspects of e-learning; Technological solutions for supporting and implementing e-learning and e-assessment; Role of technology for providing equal access to education; and Assuring quality of e-learning and e-assessment.

The organization committee of the conference is the National Distance Learning Centre in Bulgaria, supported by two of the TeSLA project partners – Sofia University and Technical University – Sofia. The conference will be held with the partial financial support of TeSLA “An Adaptive Trust-based e-Assessment System for Learning”, No 688520 under the Horizon 2020 Program of the European Union (H2020-ICT-2015 / H2020-ICT-2015).

Guest lecturers at the conference will be representatives of 4 partner universities in the TeSLA project – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain; Open University, UK; Anadolu University, Turkey; University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and 2 quality assessment agencies – AQU Catalunya and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). They will share their experience with TESLA system and the results from the pilot testing in their universities, and also they will present the distance learning models adopted in their universities. Representatives of host universities will also present their pilot results, good practices and research results within the project implementation.

L'entrada TeSLA System Presented aT 7th National Conference on e-learning ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

Technologies rapidly come into our life. Without being fully aware of what they do and how they operate, we start using them, at work, at home, in our leisure time. Gradually they change the world around us making our daily practice impossible without their presence. How does that happen? Which role do they play in our life? How do we envision our relations with technology in the future? These and many other questions were raised during the international conference “Human-Technology Relations: Postphenomenology and Philosophy of Technology” held on the 11-13th of July 2018 at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Philosophers, designers, scientists joined the conference to share their vision on human-technology relations and to discuss their ideas for creative collaborations.

In his welcome speech the conference chair Prof. Dr. Peter-Paul Verbeek emphasised that it is humans who create  technology and thus, decide how the world will change. Then technology changes human behaviour that means both humans and technology are shaped by each other without humans being aware of that (Dorrestijn & Verbeek, 2013; Verbeek, 2008). The keynote speaker Prof. Dr. Vanessa Evers, who talked about human-robot interactions, shared this vision saying that robots can be delegated a very limited number of functions compared to humans and will never fully replace humans. But integration of robots in a human life creates a new reality and requires that we respond to this reality in a new, yet unexplored, way.

The TeSLA project was represented in a paper presentation entitled “Towards  digital informed consent beyond a privacy paradox” addressing legal and usability requirements for informed consent for personal data use in the context of identification and authorship verification for e-assessment purposes. As a main outcome a blueprint for the development of informed consent was presented that supports data subjects and data controllers in an efficient and effective informed consent process. Not surprisingly, the audience was highly interested in students’ perception of personal data sharing for identification purposes, as well as  their decision-making strategies. Apart from these more philosophical interests, they were very interested in the TeSLA technology and its exploitation after the formal project end.

References

Dorrestijn, S., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2013). Technology, Wellbeing, and Freedom: The Legacy of Utopian Design. International Journal of Design, 7(3), 45–56. http://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036534420

Verbeek, P. P. (2008). Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human-technology relations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 387–395. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9099-x

The Open University of the Netherlands

Ekaterina Mulder, PhD Candidate

José Janssen, Associate Professor

L'entrada Human-Technology Relations: Postphenomenology and Philosophy of Technology ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

The TeSLA Project was presented at EDULEARN18 – the 10th Annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies

Sofia University, Bulgaria and Anadolu University, Turkey as two of the TeSLA pilot institutions presented the project at the 10th EDULEARN18 which was held in Palma de Mallorca (Spain) between 2nd and 4th of July, 2018. It is one of the biggest international conferences where more than 800 participants: experts, lecturers, researchers, technologists and profe-ssionals in education from 80 countries from around the world meet and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies, and educational innovations.  It is among the most popular and successful conferences in education in Europe.

Sofia University team presented a paper entitled “The Impact of Prior Experience of E-Learning and E-Assessment on Students’ and Teachers’ Approaches to the Use of a Student Authentication and Authorship Checking System” in a poster conference. The paper addresses cheating and plagiarism as a challenge for the introduction of e-assessment and online learning in a campus-based university at the stage of transformation of its educational model from face-to-face to online learning.
The paper aims to identify how the teachers’ and students’ experience of online learning and e-assessment affects their perspective on cheating and plagiarism in e-assessment and how the use of student authentication and authorship checking system affects their perspective on the advantages and challenges of e-assessment.

Another paper was presented in the poster conference by Sofia University and Anadolu University jointly titled “Approaches to Prevent Cheating and Plagiarism in E-Assessment: Higher Education Students’ Views” within the TeSLA Project. The paper focused on the students’ opinions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of e-assessment, types of cheating the students witness most frequently in non-invigilated exams carried out in an online environment and how students think cheating and plagiarism could be prevented or diminished in their university courses.

Another paper was presented in the poster conference by Sofia University and Anadolu University jointly titled “Approaches to Prevent Cheating and Plagiarism in E-Assessment: Higher Education Students’ Views” within the TeSLA Project. The paper focused on the students’ opinions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of e-assessment, types of cheating the students witness most frequently in non-invigilated exams carried out in an online environment and how students think cheating and plagiarism could be prevented or diminished in their university courses.

Many conference participants showed interest in the two posters and received additional information about the project, about the TeSLA instruments and the results of pilot studies.

More information can be retrieved from: iated.org/edulearn/

L'entrada International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

Written information comprises a gold mine for analyzing and understanding many human behaviors that may not be evident. For instance, knowing the extent of subjects’ vocabulary or the average length of the words they use when writing may be correlated with their education level. Likewise, information from spelling errors, punctuation marks, emoticons and the way upper/lowercase letters are used can be indicative of the age of the writer. In fact, nowadays it is possible, to some extend, to determine the gender, age, occupation and place of residence of people by simply analyzing writing patterns.

Pertaining the forensic analysis instrument of TeSLA, the interest is on discovering patterns that can capture the writing style of authors in such a way that authorship can be confirmed. But, what are the patterns that determine the writing style of a subject?, and how can these patterns be exploited to determine the authorship of documents?

Generally speaking, it is well known in the Languages Technologies community that character n-grams are among the most useful patterns when modelling writing style. These are nothing but sequences of characters of size n. The effectiveness of character n-grams lies in the fact that they can account for the occurrence of phenomenons that can be associated to writing style, and that vary across subjects. For instance, character n-grams can capture spelling errors, the way in which upper/lower case letters are used, punctuation marks, verbal forms (e.g., whether an author uses the gerund form), abbreviations (e.g., lol, ok, fyi, etc) and other linguistic patterns that may be helpful to characterize writing style. The frequency of occurrence of these patterns, combined with artificial intelligence techniques makes it possible for the forensic instrument to determine authorship of documents.

Languages Technologies and Natural Language Processing provide tools for mining the gold that textual information conveys. Thanks to progress in such fields, we can extract valuable information from users that can be used to enhance everyone’s life, just like TeSLA does. Yet, we should be aware of privacy policies and ethics of every single place we post written information, as flaws in such aspects may allow unauthorized subjects to know information that can also be used for malicious purposes.

Hugo Jair Escalante, Manuel Montes, Pastor López (INAOE team)

L'entrada A man is known by the words he writes! ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

This conference aimed to bring educational scientists, administers, education experts, teachers and graduate students together to share and to discuss theoretical and practical knowledge in the scientific environment. There were 6 parallel sessions within 4 halls in the conference with more than 120 proceedings, 120 speakers and 250 participants who were academicians, teachers, decision makers and students. The TeSLA Project was introduced to the participants, particularly mentioning on the experiences of Anadolu University as a pilot institution.

More information can be retrieved from http://www.globalcenter.info/wces/

L'entrada TeSLA in 10th World Conference on Educational Sciences (WCES-2018) ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

The synergy effect of the TeSLA Project in Management of Engineering Higher Education (as an Invited paper) was presented at the 9^th  International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES’17) which took place from 7 to 10 November in Bangkok, Thailand. 13 sessions with more than 150 participants from all over the world, mainly academician, computer scientist, researchers, students and employers from industry were organized during the conference.

The TeSLA Project was introduced to the participants in the Communities Session. The presentation of the paper attracted great interest among the participants, mainly from Asian countries who wanted to know when the system would also be available to Asian users. Additionally, advertising materials for the TeSLA project were disseminated to the participants.

The paper will be published in the conference Proceedings and indexed by the ACM Digital Library and DBLP.

More information about this conference can be found at http://medes.sigappfr.org/17/

L'entrada TeSLA Project presented at the 9th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES’17). ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

It is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector. The conference was organised by The International Academy of Technology, Education and Development (IATED) that is an organisation dedicated to the promotion of international education and university cooperation in the field of Technology and Science. More than 700 experts from 80 countries got together to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and educational innovations.

The presentation raised huge interest among the audience. It provoked a discussion on the ethical issues of the participation of SEND students and the ways in which they were identified.

The paper is published in the Conference proceedings.  More information can be retrieved from https://iated.org/iceri/announcement.

Sofia university TeSLA team

L'entrada The TeSLA Project was presented in the ICERI2017 – 10th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, 2017 ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

There is no secret that many things that people used to do in real life can now also be done virtually, like: shopping and paying bills with use of Internet banking; making friends and staying in contact through social media websites; or following courses and passing exams online. When we experience all these situations in real life, we behave in a way fitting to social norms and principles.  For example, when people meet for the first time, it is quite normal to keep some distance from each other and have a limited socially-accepted range of topics to discuss. It takes time to learn each other; and every gesture, word and movement provides valuable detail to better understand who is in front of us. The virtual world is different from the real world and full of risks. Risks concerning our privacy are hard to understand and to control when sometimes we even do not know how technologies that we use, function. To achieve the same level of privacy in the virtual world as we expect in real life, is quite a challenge. In this respect Nissenbaum (2004) speaks of “contextual integrity” which links adequate privacy protection  to norms formulated for specific contexts, “demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it” (Nissenbaum, 2004, p. 101).

This question also concerns e-assessment technologies like TeSLA that collect personal data from students for identification and authorship verification purposes.  A dominant approach addressing this question is a combination of transparency and choice (Nissenbaum, 2011). The gist of this approach is to inform users about data collection and to give them a choice whether or not to provide their data. Even those who decide to provide their data, should have opportunities to access, change or delete data, or withdraw consent. However, in practice we see that technology providers offer privacy on a “take it or leave it” basis (Nissenbaum, 2011), turning the choice into a dilemma. The same can be said of privacy policies; almost all of them are very long, and overloaded with legal terms making it impossible for ordinary users to read and understand. As a result, 85,5% of Internet users simply agree to privacy policies without reading (Elsen, Elshout, Kieruj, & Benning, 2014).

There is a need to understand the context in which a particular technology is used and expectations of users for this particular context; then – make sure that this technology does what is expected. Technology providers should think in advance not only about secure data collection and processing, but also ethical issues that can arise during exploitation. For e-assessment it means to provide students with information on instruments for identification and authorship verification in a clear way, and to give them opportunities to choose instruments according to their preferences. Depending on which data are required, preferences of students may differ. From the TeSLA pilots we know, for example, that students at the Open University in the Netherlands are much less willing to share video recordings of their face than recordings of their voice or keystroke dynamics. Some of them are even not willing to share any personal data for identification purposes. Although much work has been done already, there are still many questions that need to be answered, like: how well do students understand these technologies; how much effort do/must they make to sufficiently understand them; what is the best way to communicate it; and what influence do they have on the relationship between students and teachers. Answering these questions is of great importance for all parties in order to bring the experience of e-assessment a bit closer to a real life setting, and to create a safe and trustful environment for all students.

References

Elsen, M., Elshout, S., Kieruj, N., & Benning, T. (2014). Onderzoek naar privacyafwegingen. Retrieved from https://www.centerdata.nl/

Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Wachington Law Review, 79, 101–139. http://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2006.32

Nissenbaum, H. (2011). A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online. Journal of the Americam Academy of Arts and Sciences, 140(4), 32–48. http://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00113

The Open University of the Netherlands

Ekaterina Mulder, PhD Candidate

José Janssen, Associate Professor

L'entrada Transparency + Choice = Contextual integrity ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

WP4 partners (AQU Catalunya, ENQA and EQANIE) presented a paper entitled “External evaluation of e-assessment – a conceptual design of elements to be considered” at the 12^th European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) on 23-25 November 2017 in the University of Latvia in Riga, Latvia.

The EQAF is organised by ENQA, ESU, EUA and EURASHE and combines practice-oriented or research-based discussions in paper sessions and workshops of current developments in quality assurance (QA). The Forum is of interest to different stakeholders in QA (rectors and vice-rectors responsible for QA, QA officers in higher education institutions, students, QA agency staff, researchers working on higher education or the QA field…) and it provides an opportunity for discussion, professional development and exchange of experiences through a mix of plenary and parallel sessions.

In an ever-changing landscape of higher education and more precisely in the scope of e-learning, the concept of QA is as complex as the reality of virtual provisions themselves. Accordingly, QA must adapt rapidly to these changes to give confidence to these new realities.

QA processes in the TeSLA project aim to assure and guarantee the quality of an e-assessment system using authentication and authorship instruments. The achievement of this aim will contribute to the enhancement of educational quality in the different forms of e-learning (always in compliance with the ESG) and to increase trust and reliability in these forms of education provision.

The WP4 paper takes into consideration the aforementioned features and it was developed based on the work performed in the TeSLA project. The paper presents the overall structure and aims of TeSLA project, discusses in more detail the QA methodology and identifies the essential elements for a proper evaluation of the TeSLA system.

The full paper can be read at the following link:

http://www.eua.be/Libraries/EQAF-2017/p21_huertas_roca_moehren_ranne_gourdin.pdf

L'entrada TeSLA IN THE 12 TH EUROPEAN QUALITY ASSURANCE FORUM (EQAF) ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.

The TeSLA Project was presented in the FATİH Project in Education, Educational Technologies Summit 2017 which was organized by the Ministry of National Education, General Directorate of Innovation and Education Technologies of Turkey in November, 17^th-18^th in Ankara. There were 28 sessions, 284 proceedings, 150 speakers and more than 2000 participants who were academicians, teachers, practitioners, experts, decision makers, students and employees working in private sector companies. The TeSLA Project was introduced to the participants in the Educational Measurement and Assessment Session, particularly mentioning on the experiences of Anadolu University as a pilot institution. The Summit enabled participants to share their experiences and exchange ideas in various fields of education. More information can be retrieved from http://fatihprojesietz.meb.gov.tr/homepage-2/

L'entrada The TeSLA Project was presented in the FATİH Project in Education, Educational Technologies Summit 2017 ha aparegut primer a TeSLA Project.