Dear Moodlers,
Does anyone use the SEB (Safe Exam Browser) ?
We would like to know what are the pros and cons of using the SEB tool and what things that makes it different from using Firefox or Chrome (other than prevent Copy/Paste and using browsers to connect to the internet) ?
Many Thanks.
Hi Mario,
I am using SEB. This is the best solution for Moodle Quizes IMHO.
SEB locks the whole screen, students are not allowed to visit other pages, or opening files on the computer. In SEB, students focus on making the Quiz only and are not attracted to "ilicit" content, because simply they can not reach it.
We have SEB installed on every computer at our faculty.
The only cons is that you have to install and configure it manually for your Moodle installation.
Hey Miro, many thanks for your reply,
Is it possible to tell us which university or institution you are using it ?
We are the University of Saint-Joseph Beirut from Lebanon
Hi, see my profile ;)
+1 for SEB!
Works great, and easily deployed on Windows, Mac, iOS, and also works on Chromebooks!
Official download page here: https://www.safeexambrowser.org/download_en.html
Wish I had figured out to use it earlier, but it will solve many issues for most schools, students, and instructors!
Chromebook version is not "official", but works if you follow Colin Matheson's brilliant instructions here:
Hi,
SEB really works great for me.
I only wish it could work on Android Devices also.
I want to know that is there any setting that if student quit the SEB then quiz should submit automatically and student can not resume it again?
Thanks in advance......
You might also explore the possibility of your students having a mobile phone with a browser with them.
Marcus is correct--nothing replaces old-fashioned human boots on the ground and face-to-face proctoring...
...but technology tools can help with discouraging mindless cheating, and that's where the SEB integration is a great idea with open source tools like Moodle....
I think this is what you are looking for:
https://moodle.org/plugins/quizaccess_onesession
Works really well but you should still have a teacher / proctor in the room in case something goes wrong so that you can override the settings, answer student questions, etc.
We are a Google for Education K-12 school district with over 17,000 managed Chromebooks dispersed amongst 34 building across the city.
Unfortunately many of the safe exam browsers either cost a lot of money or required laptops with Windows or OS X. So we built our own Chromebook App called 'iLearn Secure Browser" that takes control of the Chromebook and eliminates all kinds of cheating. We were able to deploy this app to all chromebooks in minutes with the configurator which allows for customization and a few security tweaks before deployment.
Some of the features:
We are currently using/piloting this with our staff and we are looking to open source this but we are a bit busy and need to do some work on it before releasing it. Initial feedback from teachers is that it works amazingly well!
Obviously there would be a plugin submitted for a Quiz Restriction at Moodle.org and we'd include the link to the github for the Chromebook App. Since this is a bit more involved than just a plugin we don't know what level of support we'd be able to offer beyond offering it up for free which is making us nervous to release it.
Article with more details:
Video:
Hi Chris:
Wow--that's looks really cool what you guys have built and I can see why your teachers are excited, especially with the nice work you and your team have done with the Fordson Theme!!!
If you are looking for a guinea pig, I'd be happy to test it out for you and give you feedback before you push it out to the Moodle community, and could help with any documentation as another "set of eyes".....
It looks like you guys took what Colin had done with getting SEB to work as a Chromebook Kiosk app, and extended it even further with your customizations (audio feedback, whitelisting, etc.)....
I agree with you that teachers like having this feature to secure quizzing in Moodle--it makes them much more comfortable to experiment with things like mastery learning (allow students to retake quizzes / assignments / exams to learn from mistakes), leveraging Moodle to enhance real-life assessments (e.g. we had a geology teacher give a partner lab quiz where students worked in pairs testing out mineral samples with lab equipment for hardness, reactivity with acids, etc., but use Moodle to give immediate feedback, allow students to re-test for partial credit if they made a mistake, etc. turning the assessment into a powerful learning activity!), and to help harness the tool to help further the goal of making learning the focal point of using technology without all of the distractions and possible downsides of using an electronic vs. paper and pencil platform.
Hello Joseph,
We've discussed putting the App in the Chromebook store and then providing the configurator for deployment to all the managed devices.
The app does require configuration to setup the URL for the moodle site and all the security settings. If we push the app out to the store then people wouldn't have to publish their own app. They'd just have to configure before deploying. The app wouldn't work unless it was properly deployed.
The Moodle plugin is simple and easy to use. Just install and let teachers decide if a quiz requires the App or not.
Right now we are just focused on making sure teachers are happy with it. There are a lot of things to consider before pushing this out and people expecting help. This is little more involved than just a moodle plugin.
Our next deployment would be to provide this solution to all of Wayne County K-12 School districts here in Michigan. We partner and provide Moodle advice (Our theme, enrollment plugin, and setup enhancements) to our Intermediate school district, Wayne County RESA. Wayne RESA provides free moodle hosting and setup to every public school district in Wayne County, Michigan based off our "recipe" for Moodle. Pretty much everything we develop we share out to the other K-12 school districts so that they can benefit too.
We are hoping to develop a small, local community to share content and build common skillsets with teachers. We have high hopes for running our own Moodle.Net sharing platform. I hope they provide the code so others can operate their own content sharing sites for Moodle.
No problem Chris....completely respect your development process and the great work you are doing not only for your students locally, but how you are sharing your work for greater impact!
I'm not sure what tools you'd use to manage so many devices. We will have upwards of 17,000 Chromebooks by year's end. Thousands of windows devices too.
Neither are open or free but they have all the networking and other tools we need to operate as a large organization.
It's more a choice to control the device and be able to control the user experience no matter which computer they log into.
Beyond the device OS it's also about user accounts, wifi, filtering, access to organization data storage, etc.
"how to conduct exams on such devices"
I would suggest it is not possible. Well not possible without significant problems, expense, unreliability and frustration.
That’s nonsense. People concentrating only on the possible technical means of cheating when doing exams on electronic devices miss the essential point: Cheating in other ways (cheat sheets, smuggle a mobile phone with Bluetooth earpiece, smart watch etc.) is much easier and you can just prevent it by a code of honesty, good proctors/invigilators in the exam hall and severe punishment when a student gets caught cheating.
SEB is mostly used for exams on student owned devices, by estimate approximately 80% of all of the estimated 2-3 million single exams performed using SEB per year worldwide. Not many cases of cheating are reported. Surely not more than with classic exams.
Full disclosure: I’m the project leader and lead developer for Safe Exam Browser
Hallo Visvanath
I meant the first part of your last sentence "If you have control over the device, and the examination is conducted in a controlled space (lab, classroom) only then SEB is a feasible and a good solution.". But I apologize for the word "nonsense", that was not appropriate.
I understood that as a general statement that BYOD can never be secure, and as an attack on SEB ("only then SEB is a feasible solution"), which our experiences contradict. You're right that BYOD can never be 100% secure and that environments with managed devices offer more security. But unfortunately it's not feasible that all universities and schools have exam rooms with hundreds of devices. And as BYOD is the general trend, we have to work on delivering as secure BYOD environments as possible. On desktop operating systems that's a tough business and a kind of cat-and-mouse game (we close security holes as they get discovered and that goes on and on). But the OS companies realized that secure e-assessment is very important for the education sector, so there is a lot going on. iOS already has a very secure BYOD kiosk mode (since iOS 9.3.2), ChromeOS at least for managed ChromeBooks. Microsoft and Apple are working on improvements in Windows 10 and macOS to support lockdown/kiosk applications. So I'm quite optimistic about BYOD for e-assessment also in the future.
Maybe I understood your point wrong, of course you're completely right that proctoring is necessary and that exams taken at home can hardly ever be secure enough. That's also our point, we neither recommend nor support remote exams. Remote proctoring might be a business model, but I currently wouldn't try any kind of high stakes exams without human proctors and examinees sitting in an exam hall.
Regarding BYOD exams, yes, there are plenty of headaches especially in the beginning (and depending on the state of the private devices used), but with good organization, support for students and around 10% of spare university devices it works.
+1 to Daniel and the amazing SEB team for sharing your great work with the Open Source Community!!!!
100% agree that technology alone cannot solve all issues involved with cheating and academic integrity, and some of it requires old-fashioned proctoring and monitoring as well as character education and having positive relationships with students....
....but using tools like SEB does allow teachers to leverage all of the benefits of technology while minimizing some of the downsides and risks, making it possible to try and do things never before possible!!!
Thanks to SEB and Moodle, we have had teachers now trying things out that were not possible before, including giving immediate, dynamic feedback during exams, allowing students to correct mistakes, and using the tool to enhance the assessment and learning experience (e.g. taking an anatomy quiz after a rat dissection and using the adaptive and interactive modes in Moodle to help facilitate discussions with lab partners in a low-stakes learning environment with multiple attempts to help each student succeed!)!
Thank you Daniel!!!
Here's an article with another perspective on Chromebooks:
EFF: Google Chromebook is still spying on grade school students
"Privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have again outlined how Google is successfully dumping millions of low-cost Chromebooks on U.S. schools, enabling the mass collection and storage of information on children without the consent of their parents or even the understanding of many school administrators."
You could say this article is biased, but it is based on a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is highly qualified to judge privacy concerns.
In most countries in Europe it's impossible to use Chromebooks/ChromeOS in education because of the strict privacy regulations (probably it's currently only possible in some EU member states because the European Court didn't yet deal with the latest data privacy deal with the US, the last one was dismissed by the court...).
We are planning in using SEB in Moodle but the way SEB works in MacOS worries us : it seems impossible to allow only certain applications to be opened without creating a separated user account (see https://safeexambrowser.org/macosx/mac_usermanual_en.html). Our students will bring their own laptops with special software installed (for example Antidote, WordQ). Since these are students with disabilities, it's important that we allow these software (but only the software we will list). This doesn't seem a problem with Windows, but impossible on MacOS.
Have some of you used SEB in a similar context?
For the moment it seems to us a big CON for SEB.
Do you know any other secure kiosk browser which supports using the software you mentioned during exams? Maybe this is not at all possible in macOS, as the exam still should be running in a secure environment, so students can't start other apps.
You are right, maybe it is not possible.
We don't have a better option for the moment, and except this point, everything in SEB seems the perfect solution.
We are still thinking about all the implications, but probably we will use SEB anyway. The way to use it on MacOS still have to be documented in our workflow.
When using third party applications in exams, you need to use some kind of controlled operating system environment. You need to make sure that the file system is cleaned before the exam and doesn't contain private files and that Internet access for all applications is restricted to the exam server. That's something no lockdown solution can achieve reliably without the operating system being configured in such a way.
So you can either used managed PCs with a special setup for exams. But then your system administrators need to set up these machines with a reliable deployment system or network boot. They also need to monitor and maintain this system very well, especially for making sure that everything still works correctly after each time the setup of each computer is switched (for example from regular computer lab setup to exam setup).
That's why we at ETH Zurich use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for all exams where full Windows third party applications are used in exams. SEB secures the local machine, so only the virtual desktop can be accessed (and not locally installed applications). In the VDI desktops all allowed applications are installed, but the file system doesn't contain student data and Internet access is restricted. We have a German description of this SEB/VDI environment and an English technical document about the software and hardware used.
The VDI solution has quite high hardware and software license requirements, but it is much easier to handle and more reliable than doing all of that directly on managed computers. It also works with BYOD, in this case the VMware Horizon View HTML Access feature can be used, so that SEB on the student computer displays the remote virtual desktop in a full screen browser window. Given an enough stable network connection, this solution has a surprisingly good performance.
VDI is the best way and open new possibilities. We plan to test SEB on VDI, short resum
Simple like this
