Guaranteeing High Availability of the "Secure Exam Environment" (SEE)

Gabriele Frankl, Peter Schartner, Dietmar Jost

2018

Abstract

Online exams are an increasingly popular form of assessment. Compared to written exams they reduce the marking workload and offer advantages such as enhanced objectivity, assessment that includes software specific to the course and thus increased constructive alignment with teaching and learning processes. To conduct large-scale online exams without the physical restrictions of (often extremely small) computer rooms, we implemented the “Secure Exam Environment” (SEE) in 2011. The SEE enables online testing in any lecture hall with electricity and LAN sockets using students’ own devices (and loan devices if needed) while blocking access to unauthorized files or internet pages. Assessment is conducted via Moodle and additional software (e.g. Eclipse or GeoGebra) can be used as well. As of November 2017 we have conducted 1,297 such online exams with 47,930 students and are able to test up to 220 students concurrently. To maintain quality of service we developed a monitoring solution to control the growing complexity of the technical infrastructure of the SEE. The monitoring solution aims to detect failures sufficiently early to guarantee a high level of availability and to gather data to further improve the SEE.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Frankl G., Schartner P. and Jost D. (2018). Guaranteeing High Availability of the "Secure Exam Environment" (SEE) .In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-291-2, pages 130-136

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu18,
author={Gabriele Frankl and Peter Schartner and Dietmar Jost},
title={Guaranteeing High Availability of the "Secure Exam Environment" (SEE) },
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,},
year={2018},
pages={130-136},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={},
isbn={978-989-758-291-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,
TI - Guaranteeing High Availability of the "Secure Exam Environment" (SEE)
SN - 978-989-758-291-2
AU - Frankl G.
AU - Schartner P.
AU - Jost D.
PY - 2018
SP - 130
EP - 136
DO -