Strategies for Establishing Identity of Examinees in a Distance Learning Environment

Distance learning and its related contexts such as distributed learning, blended learning, and online learning have become ubiquitous and significant in realizing sustainable online teaching and learning. Learners and teachers, in a distance learning environment, seek more convenient and new strategies for establishing the identity of examinees. Despite these global impacts of technological interconnections that have significantly increased the productivity and efficiency of learning and teaching roles in a distance learning environment, numerous investigations have shown that poor identification and authentication of examinees poses serious and high stake security challenges, especially in Nigeria. These security challenges resulted majorly from the high rate of identity theft among examinees. Effective strategies to determine the identity of examinees, and secure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of examines" data, which is the pivot for sustainable online teaching and learning, have remained relatively nonexistent or unattended to. Online platform software developers in Nigeria lack strategies to determine the identity of examinees and minimize the high rate of identity theft among examinees. In this study, the authors explored a narrative review of vast works of literature that revealed significant information on the conceptual framework, existing systems that revealed the effective methods for establishing the identity of examinees. Using some keywords “Establishing of the identity of examinees”, “identity theft”, “identity security threats”, “distance learning environment”, etc., an electronic database search extracted peer-reviewed articles from the last five years. Results revealed that keystroke dynamics, voice biometric recognition can be adapted as a way of establishing the identity of examinees. The result from this study may minimize identity theft, and positively impact effective teaching and learning in a distance learning environment