Search Results (4)

The purpose of this study was to critically examine the feedback obtained from higher education instructors regarding the implementation of the emergency remote assessment practices that took place within a university in the Republic of Cyprus, in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the changes that took place. This was essential since the abruptness of the pandemic did not always allow for smooth transitions during the introduction of these changes. Therefore, the results of this survey study that was based on an online questionnaire identified certain aspects of the assessment adaptations that were evaluated as positive (e.g., the use of e-invigilation software), and other aspects that were not as positive (e.g., performing oral examinations after the written test). However, the results also revealed that cheating and plagiarism were issues that concerned the instructors, as were the technological problems that were faced. All these results are discussed holistically at the end of this article in order to guide further research and decision making regarding online assessments. Full article

Distance learning has spread nowadays on a large scale across the world, which has led to many challenges in education such as invigilation and learning coordination. These challenges have attracted the attention of many researchers aiming at providing high quality and credibility monitoring of students. Distance learning has offered an effective education alternative to traditional learning in higher education. The lecturers in universities face difficulties in understanding students’ emotions and abnormal behaviors during educational sessions and e-exams. The purpose of this study is to use computer vision algorithms and deep learning algorithms to develop a new system that supports lecturers in monitoring and managing students during online learning sessions and e-exams. To achieve the proposed objective, the system employs software methods, computer vision algorithms, and deep learning algorithms. Semi-structural interviews were also used as feedback to enhance the system. The findings showed that the system achieved high accuracy for student identification in real time, student follow-up during the online session, and cheating detection. Future work can focus on developing additional tools to assist students with special needs and speech recognition to improve the follow-up facial recognition system’s ability to detect cheating during e-exams in distance learning. Full article

Examination cheating activities like whispering, head movements, hand movements, or hand contact are extensively involved, and the rectitude and worthiness of fair and unbiased examination are prohibited by such cheating activities. The aim of this research is to develop a model to supervise or control unethical activities in real-time examinations. Exam supervision is fallible due to limited human abilities and capacity to handle students in examination centers, and these errors can be reduced with the help of the Automatic Invigilation System. This work presents an automated system for exams invigilation using deep learning approaches i.e., Faster Regional Convolution Neural Network (RCNN). Faster RCNN is an object detection algorithm that is implemented to detect the suspicious activities of students during examinations based on their head movements, and for student identification, MTCNN (Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks) is used for face detection and recognition. The training accuracy of the proposed model is 99.5% and the testing accuracy is 98.5%. The model is fully efficient in detecting and monitoring more than 100 students in one frame during examinations. Different real-time scenarios are considered to evaluate the performance of the Automatic Invigilation System. The proposed invigilation model can be implemented in colleges, universities, and schools to detect and monitor student suspicious activities. Hopefully, through the implementation of the proposed invigilation system, we can prevent and solve the problem of cheating because it is unethical. Full article

Given its generality in applications and its high time-efficiency on big data-sets, in recent years, the technique of text filtering through pattern matching has been attracting increasing attention from the field of information retrieval and Natural language Processing (NLP) research communities at large. That being the case, however, it has yet to be seen how this technique and its algorithms, (e.g., Wu–Manber, which is also considered in this paper) can be applied and adopted properly and effectively to Uyghur, a low-resource language that is mostly spoken by the ethnic Uyghur group with a population of more than eleven-million in Xinjiang, China. We observe that technically, the challenge is mainly caused by two factors: (1) Vowel weakening and (2) mismatching in semantics between affixes and stems. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Wu–Manber–Uy, a variant of an improvement to Wu–Manber, dedicated particularly for working on the Uyghur language. Wu–Manber–Uy implements a stem deformation-based pattern expansion strategy, specifically for reducing the mismatching of patterns caused by vowel weakening and spelling errors. A two-way strategy that applies invigilation and control on the change of lexical meaning of stems during word-building is also used in Wu–Manber–Uy. Extra consideration with respect to Word2vec and the dictionary are incorporated into the system for processing Uyghur. The experimental results we have obtained consistently demonstrate the high performance of Wu–Manber–Uy. Full article