Secure Exams

Secure exams with Open edX and Safe Exam Browser

Daniel Schneider, ETHZ

The Swiss MOOC Service supports Swiss institutions of higher education in addressing the challenges posed by the "digital revolution" in the field of education. It facilitates MOOCs for a worldwide audience as well as for domestic students as part of a curriculum. It is a matter of time until online exams will be conducted on the Swiss MOOC Service as well. The service is built on Open edX as the technical MOOC platform. Unfortunately, Open edX is lacking support for conducting online exams in a secure way. In order to address this shortcoming, an integration for Safe Exam Browser (SEB) has been developed to allow high stake exams with Open edX and on the Swiss MOOC Service.

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate the Safe Exam Browser integration with Open edX, which allows such secure exams. We will demonstrate how to restrict access to specific chapters or whole courses. Using such settings, students are only able to take exams if they use an approved SEB version with correct security settings. We will also give an outlook on the second phase of the SEB integration with Open edX, which will involve the currently being developed SEB Server.