18 September 2014: Safe Exam Browser: A modular approach to secure and flexible online-exams

This session was part of the joint eAssessment Scotland and Transforming Assessment online conference, 8 to 19 September 2014.

Presenters: Daniel R. Schneider and Tobias Halbherr, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich

Hosted by Dr Mathew Hillier, University of Queensland, Australia starting 07:00AM UST/GMT. Duration 57 minutes.

ETH Zürich piloted its first online-exams in 2007, in 2010 this activity culminated in an institution-wide online-exams service. In the spring term 2014 over 4’500 students were tested in 45 high-stakes online-exams. The online-exams service at ETHZ offers a selection of highly customizable and scalable exam-environments that include safeguards against both technical malfunctions and fraud. These environments allow secure access to quiz-modules of learning management systems (e.g. Moodle, ILIAS), third-party applications (e.g. Matlab, Adobe Reader, Excel, R-Studio, Siemens NX), files (e.g. lecture notes, student assignments), web domains (e.g. online help files, programming repositories, academic research databases), or even specialized hardware vie peripheral connections (e.g. USB-microscope) for the purposes of high-stakes examinations. The keystone element of the ETHZ online-exam architectures is Safe Exam Browser (SEB), a free open-source software for Windows and Mac OS X that turns any computer into a secure workstation.

This presentation introduced SEB along with our most important online-exam architectures. We also spoke about operational challenges in running and developing the online-exam service, didactical advantages of online-exams, as well as our plans and visions for the future of online-exams. A practical demonstration of SEB was provided.

Further information

• Slide Set: eAS_18_sept_2014_slides.pdf [9.5MB]
• Session chat log: eAS_18_sept_2014_chat_log.txt
• Safe Exam Browser website: http://www.safeexambrowser.org/
• Reference paper Halbherr et. al. 2014: http://www.eunis.org/download/2014/papers/eunis2014_submission_69.pdf

Session Recording

You Tube version

A screen cast of the session.

Start playing via You Tube: http://youtu.be/PlBA2qo9fZs (You can choose to view in standard definition or high definition and in full screen mode).

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