Webinar presented by Daniel Schneider & Andreas Hefti, ETHZ, March 25, 2021
The new live remote proctoring features in Safe Exam Browser (SEB) can be used for much more than just preventing cheating. They allow new exam and assignment scenarios, where students and/or educators don’t have to be in the same physical location, but still can interact together. Professors and their assistants can use the built-in audio/video chat feature to communicate with single, groups of, or all students. An exam administrator can use the SEB Server web backend to automatically set up groups, each with a specific number of students. Administrators can allow students to communicate with each other by chat or audio/video conference. They can answer questions of single students in a private chat or address the whole group. Exam administrators don’t have to manually set up a video conference in an external tool and send participant links to students. SEB Server manages all of this with single clicks. In addition, exam administrators can monitor the status of each connected SEB client in the web backend of SEB Server. This provides more information about and control over the exam environment than a learning management or e-assessment system typically offers. Exam administrators can use these features to support individual students in case of questions or problems. It will also be possible to allow students with special needs to use some otherwise disabled operating system or SEB features, individually configured in SEB Server.
With the remote exam features, hybrid exams are possible, with one part being conducted as a traditional high-stakes test and a second part in which students for example would have to explain or discuss their answers or do a group assignment.
Using the open source video conferencing solution Jitsi Meet allows full control over data privacy, as it can be hosted on-premise. This is a stark contrast to virtually any commercial remote proctoring solution. Also, each remote proctoring feature can separately be enabled or disabled, depending on examiner’s needs or legal constraints. As a commercial video conferencing alternative, we will support using Zoom, with its unmatched video quality, stability and large number of concurrent participants.
In the webinar, we will demonstrate these remote exam features and allow participants with an iOS device to try it out interactively.
