Online Programme

 

For the third time, we will be running a parallel online programme during the eAssessment Scotland conference. And once again, we are proud to announce that we will be partnering with Transforming Assessment (TA) for this venture onto the live digital stage.

The TA website has played host to a series of webinars since 2010, showcasing eAssessment developments from around the world. the site also contains a wealth of resources and examples of how technology can be used to enhance the assessment experience.

We look forward to a fruitful partnership with the TA team and would strongly recommend visiting their site and signing up for the series of webinars that take place throughout the year.

It’s going to be an ambitious endeavour with keynote presentations and seminars/workshops spread over 2 weeks. You will have the chance to hear from speakers from across the globe – talking about how technology can be used in formative and summative roles, improving the experience for learners.

Details of the programme will appear shortly. As with the rest of the conference, all of the presentations are FREE to join.

Registration for eAssessment Scotland 2014 has now closed

Online Programme (8-19th September)

All times listed below are UK-based (GMT +1)

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Session Descriptions

BYOD on Campus e-Exams at UTAS
Andrew Fluck, University of Tasmania, Australia

Awaiting description.


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Bring-your-own-laptop e-Exam for a Large Class at NUS
Seow Teck and Jeffery Tay, National University of Singapore

A large-scale e-exam was held at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for a class of about 670 students in November 2013. Students attempted the e-exam on their own laptops, which were installed with a lockdown browser. The questions were accessed via the university’s internal LMS through a wireless internet connection.

Some preliminary data from the pilot study that was conducted to investigate the perceptions of the students will be presented during the session. The technical hurdles and challenges faced in administering the e-exam will also be discussed.


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Live Online Exams at Scale: Robust Network Infrastructure
Rob Peregoodoff, University of British Columbia, Canada

Having conducted large-scale (600+) fully-online BYOD, wireless midterm and final exams for over 4 years, the Sauder School of Business has experience, both in complexity and variety of exam types. Join Rob Peregoodoff, Director of Learning Services, as he shares their story to date using Blackboard (Vista and Learn) as their platform (for good and bad). And no, they are not all multiple choice exams…


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Finland’s National Matriculation Exams Go Electronic
Matti Lattu, Finnish Matriculation Examination Board, Finland

The Finnish upper secondary school ends with a national final exam. The test is organized by a national Matriculation Examination Board which makes the exams and coordinates the evaluation. This exam will change gradually to an e-exam between years 2016-2019. A lot of characteristic properties of a high stakes exam will remain the same: the test will be arranged simultaneously in more than 400 localities, scoring will be done by two independent evaluators and the results have a great importance when applying to higher education.

The technical architecture of the exam will be decentralised. Each exam locality has its own offline test server. The encrypted package of questions and test takers’ profiles will be loaded beforehand. The test takers use x86 laptops to connect to the server. All students have equal and compatible programs as the laptops are running a USB-based Linux operating system.

After the test the answers are transferred to the centralised evaluation service which is used by roughly 7,000 for scoring. Generally the upper secondary teachers understand the need of change but all adjustments to this high stakes test cause a great anxiety among the teachers. To tackle this, we visited roughly 4,000 upper secondary staff members during the first year of the project (there are 8,000 upper secondary teachers in Finland). This autumn we’re launching a trainers’ programme to boost the training and information at schools. We’re also shipping the first preliminary version of the test system by the end of the year. The test takers’ operating system has already been downloadable for a year.


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eOSCE – Robust Real-time Electronic Marking for Clinical Examinations
Sebastian Hunkeler and Dr Philippe Zimmermann, Institute of Medical Education, University of Berne, Switzerland

Awaiting description.


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Gamification of Clickers with BYOD
Paul Lam, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Awaiting description.


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Radio EDUtalk
David Noble and John Johnston, Radio EDUtalk with Mark Glynn and Peter Reed

This session will feature a catch-up interview with the Keynote speakers from the Day Conference held in Dundee, so if you missed them on the 5th of September, now is your chance to catch up!


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Open Source Safe Exam Browser for BYOD e-Exams
Daniel Schneider and Tobais Halbherr, Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland

ETH Zurich 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.

In this presentation, we will introduce SEB along with our most important online-exam architectures. We will talk 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. If you would like to prepare for our session, we recommend reading the following paper by Halbherr et. al. 2014.


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10 Years of e-Exams at Freie Universitat Berlin: an Overview
Alexander Schulz and Nicolas Apostolopoulous, Free University Berlin, University

The winter semester of 2004/2005 marked the beginning of open book e-exams at Freie Universität. This first use involved 182 university-owned PC workstations and more than 170 student-owned laptops at the Statistics Institute, School of Business and Economics. Although this scenario had many advantages for the university, the e-exam service team faced several challenges when they attempted scaling this to a large number of participants. This included preparing numerous student owned laptops for e-examinations, or dealing with compatibility and security in closed book e-exams. In this session,

Nicolas and Alexander will share their experiences that eventually lead Freie Universität Berlin to technically set up rooms for BYOD e-exams in 2008 and then their modern E-Examination Center (EEC) in 2013 equipped with more than 150 PC workstations.


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