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Secure Assessment in the Digital Learning Space

How to promote academic integrity in remote learning and in-person classrooms with 1:1 laptops

My interest in devising 21st century learning spaces really took off during the pandemic. The school district I was working in at the time had already moved to get all students in middle and high school Chromebooks and all classrooms had interactive projectors (“Smartboards” at the time). I had the advantage of having two perspectives on this, one as a former IT guy (I was district technology coordinator in a few schools in addition to my full-time teaching role and I was a certified network admin) and one perspective as a teacher. I knew we were just co-opting office productivity software for classroom use and it just was not cutting the mustard. Most notably, in our move to digital learning spaces, we lost some of the guardrails we used to maintain academic integrity.

What I mean by digital learning space, a term I use interchangeably with “21st century learning space”, is a software application hosted on the internet in which students conduct their studies and teachers conduct their lessons. My phrase “maintain academic integrity”, well, that mostly just means it was harder to keep kids from cheating.

This situation has come a long way since that time. Schools use a number of content filters, tracking apps, and screen monitoring software that is quite effective. But there are still gaps and I would put Innovation forward as a remedy to fill some of those gaps. Innovation plugs pretty easily into any LMS via convenient links.

Security Tier 1

The apps at Innovation fall into several functional tiers. Tier 1 entails just recording and reporting student activity on the apps. The Proctor is installed to monitor student activity as they interact with the digital learning space. It logs the following student actions:

started task
left the page
returned to the page
pasted in text
resized window
saved work

Tier 1 security on the short answer has some added records, such as notification when student deletes all of their response and the size of newly saved work compared to the answer it replaced. This was devised in response to a student who used to delete all his work and then claim he needed a retake because the system did not save. 🙄

In addition, the short answer task does not allow some other actions such as right click, spell-check, grammerly, activating dev tools, and the like.

Tier 1 security is applied by default on the Etude, short answer, grammar, world language composition, and media proctor. The media proctor records:

video started
video paused
left page
returned to page
duration engaged with video

At the tier 1 security level, the idea is to record detailed information about student engagement and to provide two things: 1) messaging to students showing what is being recorded and 2) reports for instructors who may or may not wish to take action on what the proctor saw. Just telling students that their actions were suspicious (like pasting in text) can serve to deter some mischief.

Tier 1 security is enhanced by the new Monitor app. This allows teachers to view student work progress on a task in real time (well, there’s a 10 second delay after student saves, but it’s still pretty quick). Monitor is available for short answer, grammar, world language composition, and Etudes. The Monitor displays all students who have saved work to the task. Select a student, and their work is shown. The proctor summary shows how many times students are doing each of the proscribed actions.

The multiple-choice app by default has security tier 2.

Security Tier 2

Tier 2 security is enabled by the teacher on the Master page for a task. the master page is accessed from the course playlist under the Task dropdown. Select “Modify test” from the controls at the top, and check the “High Security” checkbox.

When high security is enabled, the short answer task will close and submit responses if the student gives focus to any other page. The student will be locked out until they are formally re-admitted. Re-admit students from the course playlist using the Task dropdown in the controls on the right of the task.

In addition, short answer and multiple-choice tasks can be locked to certain single-use key codes. Once locked, teachers need to provide each student a different code from the list that was generated in order to allow access to the test. This limits attempts to take the test in situations where students have limited chances.

Further, teachers who need this level of security are encouraged to set time limits on the tasks. This will discourage cheating because it often takes time to look things up. In cases where some students get more time on task, you can set exceptions from the testing modification controls in Utilities. Go to Virtual Classroom and Testing Accommodations.

Tier 2 security can be enhanced by having a proctor with students to prevent accessing other devices. In addition, some schools have screen monitoring software like GoGuardian that can assist in monitoring. Perhaps this would be called “tier 3”?

Why not give Innovation a try in your classroom?

Teaching Remotely Can Be A Chess Game …

Luckily, there’s Innovation!

Pawn to queen 3… Knight to bishop 3… Ugh!

I don’t know what metaphor best describes testing online, “arms race” or “chess match”. The frog in the slowly boiling water is another metaphor for this, but I’ll get to that later.

My young friends across the nation in my remote classes are digital natives. They know the schtick. The know that most applications people use to teach were designed for office workers and that the kind of monitoring and controls that we expect when teaching high school are just not included nor generally welcome by the cubicle crowd.

In one school, I am to use Canvas. Student has an essay due at a certain time. They compose in Google Docs and paste a share link in the Canvas assignment submission application. This way, they have something in on time and won’t be penalized if they are still working on it after deadline because it’s a Google Doc still in their custody. Wow. That’s clever.

In one school, I am using Innovation plugged in to Canvas. When the security triggered and locked the student out of a test, he complained that he “just had a question for his teacher” and was guilty of nothing more than clicking on Zoom to ask. 🙄

I have inherited one AP French class from another instructor who did not maintain the kind of guardrails that I would have done. Students were basically able to paste in AI- or translator-generated responses to assignments. They had wonderful grades! All above 98! When I met them and asked for improvised conversation in French, they mixed up the words for 16 and 60… one asked his classmate to tell him what to say.

When I first start working with a remote class, I don’t activate all the security. Let’s face it, security online is necessary, but adds extra steps to things that are often annoying. Two-factor authentication, waiting for a confirmation email from a site to validate an email address, proving one is not a robot by clicking on all the pictures of bikes, using some third party app to authenticate us… I could go on. This stuff is annoying and time consuming. So to start, I don’t activate it on my remote assignments.

But then I may start seeing language proficiency well beyond the typical means of French class students. I see compositions that always end in “En conclusion…”. I see lots of “pasted text” records in the proctor logs. Now I turn up the heat.

The metaphor I might use here is the frog in the beaker of water in the science lab where they are turning up the bunsen burner so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice it. 😏

Using Innovation’s extensive student activity logging features, I can email the student to tell him he needs to use his second chance on the test because the proctor logs recorded he left the page 12 times and pasted text 3 times. 🙄

Using Innovation’s locking app, I can restrict access to the test after the due date to single-use codes that students must request in order to get in to use their second try privilege. Innovation’s locking app will allow me next month to restrict access from the start to single-use codes so that I micro-manage student access even more closely.

I can use Innovation’s high security setting to have the short answer test app close up and lock if the student leaves the task during the testing period (like to view another window). They’ll have to contact me to re-admit them.

I can follow closely exactly what a student is doing in the proctor’s notes for short answer and composition. Did they paste in text? Delete their answer completely? Leave the page?

Anecdote: I had a student back my last year teaching full-time before I retired. He was in my 9th grade Global Studies class. He wanted to take a test again because he said the app deleted all his work! I re-coded the app to record when a student deletes all their work. Next time, I caught him. He was just deleting it all and claiming a software error didn’t save his work.

Do you know what one of the biggest challenges of teaching adolescents is? It is to learn not to take these antics personally. Like most adults, it is in their interest to get as much as they can out of life with the least investment of energy. Sadly, this often leads to strategies that are in the long-term self-defeating and that violate ethical norms. I’m there: I still like my kids even though they can engage in what my grandmother would have called “diveltry”.

Pawn to queen 3… Knight to bishop 3… I have been teaching since my current students’ parents were in elementary school. I have all the tools I need to meet move for move as my digitally-native young friends try to take shortcuts. Innovation helps me do that!

Checkmate! 😉

Student Random Call-on App

In my current situation teaching part-time as a retiree remotely, I do find it useful to call on students in remote classes. Keeping students engaged in the lesson in a virtual class is a high priority for my attention during a lesson. This is perhaps moreso than in an in-person situation. I think it’s in the nature of digital devices with their many distractions and also due to the limitations placed on human interaction through these tiny windows!

When I am teaching new vocabulary to my French students, I like to use Innovation’s flashcard app. I use this all the time, especially in my beginner level French classes. The app allows me to execute a number of instructional operations: I can show the word, show the meaning, shuffle the word, save out only those words that are problematic for review of a narrower list, practice from definition to term or from term to definition. It really is very flexible.

Now, Reader, in one online high school I work for, all my lessons are one-on-one. So, using the flashcard app is really easy: I share my screen and conduct the instruction.

But teaching to a remote class, even as small as eight students, offers a challenge to maintaining engagement and attention. Last week, I was trying out a new strategy that turned out to work very well. The instructional context is a group of eight students in an AP French class. I needed to teach vocabulary using direct instruction. Here’s what we did: I showed a new term and pronounced it several times. next, I randomly called on a student to repeat and pronounce. then I showed the word’s meaning, then randomly called a different student to type in the Zoom chat to only me the meaning. This protected them from any embarrassment if they got it wrong, although the exercise is set up to be so easy as to limit that possibility. After the session, I sent them a link to a little quiz. The whole thing took about 15 minutes for ten words.

But I was not really great at calling on all students evenly. Some faces were hidden in the way Zoom displays them, so some students did not get called on as much.

There’s a new application now at Innovation that helps teachers to randomly select the next student to respond. It is installed in two places at present, in the main dashboard on the right and inside the flashcards app.

It’s very simple to use. In the flashcard app, click the “Call on Random” button on the left. On the right will appear a simple form. You type in the names, save them, then just click “Select random student”. Voilà! Your next participant!

The app randomly selects a student from the list and then removes them so they cannot be called again until everyone else has been. You can update the list any time.

Look for the random call app to be installed in a number of other places at the site, such as the improvised dialogue app.

Monitoring Student Progress in Real Time

Innovation has always developed in response to authentic, practical instructional needs of students and teachers. In retirement, I am enjoying teaching part-time remotely and this continues to inspire new apps and coding enhancement.

You know, Reader, if you take a good look at what you are using to teach in digital spaces, you may observe like I did that a lot of it is software originally designed for office workers. Word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software and the like: these were made for adults doing largely self-directed work in office work. We are so accustomed to these apps that we hardly realize that they don’t ever quite exactly fit for us in the classroom; that we are always creating modifications and work-arounds to make them work. And we get by…

21st century learning spaces, a paradigm often expounded here at this site, are virtual workspaces that really “fit” secondary instruction in ways that office productivity products do not. Let’s address monitoring student work.

One of my classes this year is an AP French class down in Texas. My objective was to teach them a new grammar point. During our in-class practice, I needed to be able to monitor their work while they were doing it.

Reader, you may already be familiar with Innovation’s grammar learning app. Students learning world languages benefit from practice transforming and generating utterances from prompts. The app meets this need by providing a digital learning space that is interactive. An algorithmic AI lets students know how close they are to the answer, for example, and the instructor can transform the content into a “live session” in which students participate in real time much like the famous Kahoot! game.

Adolescents can sometimes be distractible. In an in-person classroom, I have reasonable observational capacity to notice and redirect distracted students. In remote teaching, this requires some additional effort. What if I could see the student’s’ progress in real time as they worked?

Screenshot of a “live session”, an interactive space where the teacher can pose prompts and students respond in real time interactivity.

People learning new things can sometimes make mistakes. In an in-person classroom, I can wander the room and peer over students’ shoulders. I can try to catch mistakes as they make them and offer correction in a more immediate way. It’s a shame to have to wait a day or two before addressing writing errors. Immediate feedback is more effective so that the other practice examples go well and inculcate the correct syntax. What if I could peer over everybody’s virtual shoulders while they practiced their new writing skill?

The monitor app is now installed at Innovation’s short answer and world language composition tasks. It allows the instructor to view all of the students currently with any saved work on the task. Click the student name, and the instructor can see their work in real time (well, there’s a ten second lag for technical reasons). This work is refreshed every ten seconds. In the short answer monitor, the number after each name tells how many responses they have saved.

In situations where the teacher may wish to share the screen with the class, they can hide the student names and, for the short answer tasks, hide the correct answers.

The monitor, set up for a short answer task, showing students anonymously when needed.

The way I like to use this is as follows: I use two monitors. Monitor 2 is shared with students. I can set the names to “Anonymous” and share the monitor. I select students at random from time to time to check their progress. I may focus on someone who is behind. I may focus on someone I know needs more support (I can see the names before setting anonymous). In monitor 1, on the Zoom or Teams call, I can use the chat to message students corrections, suggestions, redirections if they appear off task, and so forth.

the monitor app, hiding the correct answers in short answer tasks when needed.

To activate the monitor, scroll to the activity in your dashboard course playlist. You’ll find “Monitor Class” in the task dropdown. Monitor is installed for short answer and composition tasks at present. While you are wandering around the site, why not visit our newly opening shops? You can purchase my own activities, PowerPoints, and DBQs for social studies.