New ways of restricting access to subsections
Overview
Course designers sometimes need to control the conditions under which a learner can access the contents of a subsection.
Currently the platform allows them to:
Control access contingent on the grade or completion level of a previous subsection using “subsection prerequisites”.
Control the total time to access the subsection via “Timed exams”
This proposal intends to add additional access control options, such as:
Based on a whitelisted range of IP addresses
Based on a password that the learner needs to type
Based on the browser being used by the learner - Safe browser limitation (https://safeexambrowser.org )
Problem
When delivering exams, especially on campus, but also in fully online courses or MOOCs, course creators need different tools to ensure that learners take the exam or access content under the appropriate conditions.
Use cases:
As the course Creator and instructor in a blended learning course, I want to deliver an exam that is going to be taken by learners in person, in a shared classroom where the appropriate support can be provided and where any cheating can be monitored and suppressed. The simplest way to do this is to have the exam placed in a subsection that is protected by a password that I can set and reveal to the students inside the classroom right before taking the exam.
As the course Creator and instructor in a blended learning course, I want to deliver some content and activities that are desgined to be consumed by learners in person, in a shared classroom or from a specific location (Company premises, University campus, etc). One way to ensure that Learners will be taking it from the authorized location is to restrict the subsection to only be accessible from a particular IP address or range of IP addresses.
As the course creator of a fully online course, I want to reduce the potential risk of Learners misbehaving during the taking of an exam. In cases where Advanced proctoring technologies are not financially viable, I can Resort to the use of the Safe Exam Browser, which limits the learner's ability to do other unauthorized tasks on the same computer while taking the exam.
Proposed solution:
The initial approach is to extend the current capability and provide course authors with these new configuration options for the subsection as well as provinding learners with a similar experience of that provided by timed exams, that is, a screen to appear when entering the subsection with the information about the kind of restriction that this subsection has and the instructions to follow.
Some key attributes of the proposed solutions are:
Each of the control options will be behind a feature flag, the same way time exams is.
each of the control mecanisms can be activated independently and for each mechanism, the system will display the corresponding configuration options.
The implementation of the password feature sets one password for all the learners in the course.
The implementation of the IP address range shall be able to accomodate IPv4 and IPv6 ranges
The implentation of Safe exam browser will be done with a clean interface that will simplify in the future the addition of alternative secure browsers such as Respondus lockdown browser
Include any UX/UI designs
view | proposed UI |
|---|---|
Studio. when setting the advanced visibility options of the subsection. |  |
Learner, when trying to access a subsection that is password protected. |  |
Learner, when trying to access a subsection that is limited to a range of IP addresses. | |
Learner, when trying to access a subsection that is limited to the safe exam browser. |
About SEB
Safe Exam Browser or SEB, is an open source web browser environment to carry out e-assessments safely. The software turns any computer temporarily into a secure workstation. It controls access to resources like system functions, other websites, and applications and prevents unauthorized resources from being used during an exam.
Important parts of this project have been carried out as part of the program "AAA/SWITCH –
e-Infrastructure for e-Science" led by SWITCH, the Swiss National Research and Education Network, and the cooperative project "Learning Infrastructure" (part of the CRUS program "Information Scientifique: accès, traitement et sauvegarde") coordinated by SWITCH, and was supported by funds from the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich) Board.
For more information visit https://safeexambrowser.org/
Other approaches considered:
In order to have password protected subsections, I can create a subsection with only one text input problem, where the correct answer is the password, and then use the grade of this subsection and the subsection prerequisite feature to gate the access to the subsection that needs to be password protected. This works, but it is cumbersome for both the course author and the learners.
Similarly, a custom problem could be created in a previous subsecction to grant the correct status only when the network IP is in the desired range, and then use this subsection grade to gate the content of the controles subsection.
For the Safe exam browser, a plugin can be implemented, and infact has been implemented and used since 2018. More information about the open edX SEB plugin here. However, this would be a valuable addition to the main features of the platform and would help bridge the feature parity gap with other lms platforms.
Competitive research:
How do Canvas/Moodle/Coursera solve this problem?
In Moodle: all 3 options are available: SEB, ip restriction, and password restriction.
In canvas: all 3 options are also available, except they don’t use SEB but respondus lockdown browser
In sakai, all 3 options are also available, except they don’t use SEB but respondus lockdown browser
Proposed plan for any relevant usability/UX testing
Once this proposal gets cleared for development, we plan to produce a low resolution interactive prototype and perform a few tests with users to validate for clarity and effectiveness.
Plan for long-term ownership/maintainership
edunext is commited to build and contribute this work as part of the unidigital (spanish government) project. As part of that commitment, edunext would commit to maintain the feature for a minimum of 2 years and after that, either find a suitable maintainer to hand it over to, or to follow a the deprecation procedure in case the feature has any inconvenience or its maintenance is a burden that no one can carry.
Open questions for rollout/releases
TBD