Online courses are becoming a bigger part of universities, even for students on campus. Just ask the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, which now offers an average of 400 online courses a semester. About 80 to 90 courses per semester use a new UOnline Center testing facility to ensure students of the online courses take the exams in a controlled and equal environment.
In other words, the UOnline Center is largely there to make sure students don’t cheat.
The UOnline Center opened in February of this year, just in time for the spring semester’s testing season. It features 112 Lenovo ThinkCentre computers mounted beneath the desks with accompanying 19-inch Samsung LED-backlit screens (and two 22-inch screens for ADA students). The computers are connected to a subnet through switches to administer the tests.
As the university offered online courses, it also developed an interest in building a department and having the exams proctored, says UOnline Center Manager Stanford Clements. However, limited space for this meant limited times to offer exams, so the UOnline Center was carved out of a classroom and archive room in the campus’ Marriott Library.
Instead of only testing on Thursday evenings and Saturdays, now the center is open for testing Mondays through Saturdays. “We recognized the potential for expanding and giving students and faculty more online opportunities,” says Clements.
To take an exam for an online course, students first go to the UOnline Center website and book a time offered for that test. When they arrive, their IDs are checked in a reception area that is separated from the testing area by a glass wall and they’re assigned to seats.
LanSchool software monitors all the screens and enables staff to see a screen and control the screen or even shut a computer down. Once an exam is up and running, the computer is turned over to the user and runs Learning Management System software Canvas, by Instructure.
Canvas is used for the online courses at the school, and has features including virtual meetings, Internet audio and video, discussion groups, messaging, an announcement board for the instructor and notifications via emails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. RSS feeds and podcasting are also possible. “It has a lot of different ways for students and instructors to communicate and collaborate,” Clements says.
Canvas is run and maintained by Instructure and accessed by the school through the cloud, allowing faculty to manage the content.
The UOnline Center has its own subnet that connects to the university server, and it is in the process of moving the workstation management system to Altiris, an endpoint management and security solution hosted by the university information technology department (UIT). Altiris allows Windows operating system applications and patches to each workstation remotely. It also has the ability to virtualize a software application in Windows when an application is needed for a specific test but does not need to be permanently installed on the machine. “We run regular patches out to our standalone lab computers,” says Clements.
Paper tests are also administered for some online courses through the UOnline Center, and live, human proctors roam the testing area. There are no cameras monitoring the students—yet. “We felt very strongly that a camera can’t compensate for a live pair of eyes, and [having proctors] sends a good message for students taking the exams,” Clements says. The proctors can also assist students with technical and help issues.
The university tries to keep up on cheating techniques from crib notes written on hands to those carefully reprinted on soda bottles, for instance. Students taking the same tests next to one another may have the questions shuffled to prevent successful peeking.
The computers can be locked down so students can’t use them during tests to access the Internet, but for now they are open, and if a student attempts to browse, he is caught and the screen is frozen before any online information can be accessed.
In the prep room are the guts of the system, consisting of three Power over Ethernet (PoE) 48-port Cisco 2960-S switches that connect all of the computers via fiber to the university’s server. The switches are configured as stacking kits, which allow them to be managed as one switch. (See slideshow.)
Four troughs under the floor of the lab have separate conduits for power cables and the Cat 6 cables connecting the computers.
Satellite sites and out-of-area online exams require proctored environments in a commercial testing facility, library or local university or U.S. Military Educational Offices, says Clements. A $30 online course fee covers the cost of maintaining the software.
“We’ve been getting an overwhelming response from faculty for support and haven’t had complaints about tech support,” he says.
A flat-panel monitor is on order for the reception area to display the website with exam schedules and changes. And Clements is looking to expand the department further. “I wish we were bigger. Down the road we’re looking at maybe more labs like this.”
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