Designing a Secure Exam Management System

Designing a Secure ExamManagement System

E-LEARNING has experienced such an extraordinary growth over the last years that its global industry market is estimated to be worth USD 91 billion [1]. Learn-ing Management Systems (LMSs), due to being essential tools of e-learning, have been adopted by many organiza-tions to establish and provide access to online learning services. Nowadays, the success of LMSs is so great: 74% of the US corporations and educational institutions cur-rently offering e-learning employ LMSs in their training programs [2]. In Spain, over 90% of the universities and colleges use an LMS [3]. According to [4], 29% of the or-ganizations (banking sector, retailing sector, etc.) in Tur-key have adopted e-learning applications. Globally, 79.5% of large companies were reported to be using these sys-tems in their training programs in 2008 [5] and the market for LMS is estimated to have an annual growth rate of about 25.2% through the year 2018 [6]. The expansion of mobile devices, meanwhile, is providing new ways to learn (mobile learning or m-learning). The 2015 Horizon Report [7] mentions that Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) learning technology is expected to be increasingly adopted by institutions in one year’s time or less to make use of mobile and online learn-ing. Forecast of the number of smartphone users for 2019 is 5.6 billion globally which is three times that for 2013 [8]. Thus, LMSs must change to adapt to new user require-ments and technologies. For example, interaction with external applications, such as social networks and mobile applications, must be incorporated in LMSs [9] to facili-tate personal learning demands that happen anywhere and at any time. M-learning puts the control of the learning process in hands of the learner itself [10] and enhances collaboration and flexibility. It is concluded in [11] that having a mo-bile, accessible e-book is “perceived to benefit

student learning due to the value placed on the affordance of situated study in everyday life.” The students that partic-ipated in this study expressed feelings of competence and high self-efficacy, and that they were able to learn more using their e-books. Moreover, among other technological factors impacting the future of m-learning, Rao et al. [12] asserted that cloud computing would make mobile learn-ing more efficient in many ways, ultimately in time and cost. A web portal developed using Amazon’s cloud computing service is presented in [13] whereby teachers without programming skills can implement interactive learning processes. The materials developed can be used with mobile applications on Android and iOS based de-vices. Some of the contributions of m-learning [14] are: 1.It is learner-centered [15]. 2.It is a new alternative for information delivery and 3.It enhances collaborative learning [16]. On the other hand, m-learning faces several challenges [14] such as: 1.Lack of teacher confidence, training or technical difficulties with mobile devices [17], [18]. 2.Lack of institutional support [17], [18]. 3.Interoperability problems with LMSs [19]. 4.Security and privacy issues [20], [21]. One possible solution to overcome these challenges is the integration of m-learning initiatives with LMSs. From students’ point of view, m-learning could personalize their learning process as well as enable them to collabo-rate with other students or teachers. From teachers’ point of view, they could continue to use LMSs as their work-ing platform, leaving mobile devices for students. The problem, however, is that the integration between m-learning applications and LMS is not an easy task. Indeed, LMSs do not generally contain interoperability standards to communicate with external applications; they are usu-ally designed as monolithic or layered systems [9]. Moodle, as one of the mostly accepted and widely used open-source LMS, is a web-based application. It had a user base of 83008 registered and verified sites, serving 70696570 users in 7.5+ million courses with 1.2+ million teachers as of June 2013 [22]. Yet, due to the fact that it is not made to be service oriented, its services cannot be consumed through client applications other than web browsers. This has limited its scope of use to personal computers; therefore, the Moodbile Project [23] was con-ceived to extend the Moodle functionality to the world of mobile devices. This project aims to enable mobile learn-ing applications to work together with the widely accept-ed Moodle LMS by incorporating the appropriate external web services into Moodle architecture or redesigning certain components of Moodle to be service oriented. Even though Moodle 2.0 already had a collection of web services, these web services focused on developing an API suitable for massive batch actions like user or course creation and inscriptions. They are not, however, suitable for the integration of mobile learning applica-tions and do not properly address security management issues. Moodle Architecture is designed following the classic three-tier architecture where the major part of business logic is located at Domain Tier as illustrated in Fig. 1. While Domain and Presentation tiers have not been changed with respect to Moodle Architecture, the Mood-bile extension has created two tiers

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