It’s now just over a year into the TeSLA project, and work is well underway for our second round of pilot studies.
The TeSLA e-assessment system is designed to authenticate learners while they undertake high-stakes assessments in online and blended learning environments. In other words, TeSLA will ensure that the students taking online assessments are who they claim to be – thus eliminating identity fraud (cheating!) and ensuring the integrity of the assessments (helping warrant that the assessment outcomes are trustworthy).
Enabling students to complete online assessments in a secure and verified environment also means that students will no longer have to attend face-to-face examination centres. Not only will this save time but for some students, those who have specific physical or other disabilities, TeSLA-verified online assessments will make participating in high-stakes assessments possible for the first time.
Our technical partners in the TeSLA consortium have been working hard to prepare all of the TeSLA technologies. There are two groups of technologies: biometric and document analysis. The biometric tools comprise face recognition (does the examinee look like the original student?), voice recognition (does the examinee sound like the original student?), and key stroke dynamics (does the way in which the examinee uses their keyboard, for example the speed and rhythm of their key strokes, match the way in which the original student used their keyboard?). Meanwhile, the document analysis tools comprise text forensic analysis (does the style of the examinee’s writing match the style of the original student’s writing), and anti-plagiarism (is the examinee’s writing original?).
These five separate biometric and document analysis technologies have been brought together within the TeSLA system, which in turn has been integrated into a number of learning management systems (including Moodle and Blackboard).
The second round of pilots, what we are calling our ‘Medium Test-bed Pilots’, will involve around 3,500 students trying both biometric and document analysis tools – that’s 500 students in each of seven pilots: at the Open University in the UK, Sofiiski Universitet Sveti Kliment Ohridski and the Technical University of Sofia in Bulgaria, the Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, Anadolu University in Turkey, and Jyvaskylan Yliopisto in Finland. As well as seeing how the TeSLA technologies perform, this round of pilot studies will also allow the project to investigate the security and integrity of the system (for example, the use of digital signatures) and its potential for deployment at scale.
At the Open University (OU), we are working with 18 separate course modules across four faculties (which has involved a lot of conversations with a lot of very helpful module leaders and their teams) in order to invite more than 20,000 students to participate in our pilot. Why so many? The OU has years of experience involving our online students in academic research and we have developed a number of best practices. For example, we will only invite our students to participate in research a maximum of once a year, and because we are a research-intensive university some of our pool of potential participants will already have been contacted. Those students will be removed from our list. Second, because we won’t make participation compulsory, inevitably there will be a large dropout – perhaps as many as 90% of those whom we invite!
Nevertheless, with the support of our module colleagues the OU will easily achieve 500 participating students, with any surplus being held back for the third round of pilots taking place at the end of the year. Currently, we are undertaking our final preparations, to complete our TeSLA Pilot 2 by the end of June, and we can’t wait to get started.
After June, we will blog again to let you know how the TeSLA Pilot 2 went, in the UK, Bulgaria, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey and Finland. Watch this space!
The Open University of UK Team
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.