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.
SEMS EXAM
ENGINE
CORE
SERVICES
AND FUNCTIONALITIES
The Quiz Engine
embedded in Moodle is not built based on Service Oriented Architecture. It is
implemented as a bulk of PHP code which has to be accessed through standard web
browsers that are a bit slow on mobile de-vices and cannot address the exam
security issues that exist in m-learning environment. Moodbile services
ex-tension to Moodle does not touch the Moodle’s Quiz En-gine. Thus, we need to
develop a new Quiz Engine that can be deployed as a service oriented
application, so that its services can be consumed by a mobile application
designed to cater to m-learning specific security require-ments. As well, it
should be integratable with Moo-dle/Moodbile in order to have a complete LMS
which suites the m-learning environment and addresses all of its security
issues. The core services of the proposed Exam Engine are discussed below.
1.
Secure and Random Distribution of Exam
Questions
This service provides
the following functionalities:
1.Enabling the teacher
to define a bank of exam questions and to link them to his/her subject through
an appropriate interface (Subject’s Ques-tion Bank Interface). In case of
objective kind of questions, each question may have a set of options. The
teacher has to provide those options through the same interface and specify the
correct choices among them to enable the exam engine to auto-evaluate students’
answers. In case of descriptive kind of questions, a text box (or probably a
sketch-ing canvas) will appear below each question at the student device screen
to allow him/her to write/draw the question’s answer; those answers will be
saved at server side to be further reviewed and evaluated by the teacher. In
addition, each question will have a property to specify its diffi-culty “level”
(let’s say: A, B, C, D, and E). https://codeshoppy.com/shop/
2.Enabling the teacher
to specify a subject’s exam properties such as: Date and Time, Duration,
Per-centage of level A, level B, and level C questions in the exam paper, etc.
through an appropriate inter-face (Subject’s Exam Setup Interface).
3.Securely
authenticating and enrolling students, using any of the well-known secure
authentication mechanisms, into exams at the pre-defined date and time through
the Exam Enrollment Interface. Multifactor authentication can be adopted for
stronger security
4.Creating exam
instances by random distribution of exam questions to the enrolled students’
mo-bile/tablet devices according to the predefined ex-am properties such as
percentage of each question level. This means that questions are not going to
reach students in the same order. Moreover, the multi-choices of each question,
in case of objective questions, will be flipped randomly and delivered
differently to each student. The Exam Server asso-ciates the exam questions
with a message digest signed by its private key to ensure data integrity. The
Exam Server also has to memorize the way it has distributed the questions to
each student to be able to evaluate the correct answers once the stu-dents
submit their answers back to the Exam Serv-er. This process, illustrated in
Fig. 2, guarantees that each student gets different questions order and makes
cheating by “hand-signals” impossible. The prepared questions bank is reusable.
Teachers can always enrich their courses’ questions bank by adding new
questions or upgrading old ones dur-ing the semester. At the exam time, it is
the re-sponsibility of the Exam Server to create exam in-stances out of the
questions bank. Incorporating the “question level” concept helps the Exam
Serv-er to prepare a moderate kind of questions while selecting them out of the
questions bank.
5.Students answer the
exam questions through the Exam Client Software Interface. Their answers are
then submitted to the Exam Server along with a signed message digest to ensure
the integrity.
6.Processing students’
answers to determine their grades in the test. The Exam Server has to evaluate
students’ answers according to the questions’ cor-rect solutions pre-defined by
the teacher. Then it has to generate the appropriate reports.
7.Reporting: The Exam
Engine has to generate a set of reports to enrich the assessment process, like:
·Subject’s Exam
Report: It reflects statistical in-formation about a particular exam (Students’
Grades, Min, Max and Average Grade, etc.). ·Student’s General Report: It reflects general
in-formation about the performance of a particular student in the whole
semester/year. It shows his/her scored marks in all subjects and calcu-lates
his/her GPA and other statistical values. ·Teacher’s Report: It shows the average
perfor-mance of students in all the subjects given by a particular teacherhttps://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/smart-buying-environment-using-smart-city-infrastructures/
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