Online Proctoring : Experimentation of Remote Examination in E-learning programs

International audienceOur paper will deal with the change in examination conditions for students registered in remote learning courses. The remote learning evaluation on e-learning platforms (LMS) can carry out individual and collective activities but these activities aren't supervised. For exams, examination conditions and identity verification must be as reliable as if the examination were taking place at the institution. Today, in most of the cases, students registered in remote learning course must always travel to the university to sit their exams. In some cases, the universities have foreign partners who can organize for the exams to take place near the student's location (which can still be costly in terms of the workload for the organizationsand not being able to offer it to a larger number of students, and also in terms of fees for the students). Students can't understand no longer the incoherence between educational activities and home support on the online platforms and the exams that must be sat at the institution. We observed that many remote students only chose to sit their exams in the end of the second semester in the "second chance" exams session which, consequently, ends up being their only exam period, breaks the rules of fairness for the students. This is easy to understand for students who live far from the university and particularly for foreign students and/or students who work. To have to travel to an institute can be expensive (taking leave from work, transport, hotel costs, accommodation…). For some students, this constraint can even be the reason why they don't register for the course, even when it is offered online. This problem makes remote learning unattractive to potential students. Different ways of providing remote exams are now available and can solve this problem with educational alignment. These methods must be tested and evaluated in terms of their cost, their security, their resistance to fraud, the induced stress for the students and the conditions that are put in place. We must explore alternative methods for carrying out exams remotely. We are currently experimenting with examination conditions supervised by a webcam at the student's house and screen sharing for students studying in two universities, members of the French Association of E-learning (Fédération Interuniversitaire de l'Enseignement à Distance-FIED). These are :-The Caen University in Normandy.-The Pierre & Marie Curie University of Paris The Caen's experiment deals with students in a master degree in a health management program. The Paris's experiment deals with all distant programs, in mathematics and physics, from batchelor to master, for specific categories of students only for this first year of experiment. These experiments take place in the Erasmus+ European Project "Online Proctoring For Remote Examination" (OP4RE). We will give in the paper the first results obtained from our experiments and their outcomes. We will present the results of survey that were done before and after taking the exams to evaluate the impact of the stress, and the encountered difficulties. We will then discuss about how succeed in generalizing our experiments