A novel authentication scheme for E-assessments based on student behavior over E-learning platform

Abstract

E-Learning and distance education have become common choices for academic institutions. Based on advances in information technology systems, educational institutions have enabled the employment of e-learning systems as teaching courses and evaluation students. However, security issues related to e-learning systems have been raised by e-learning environment stakeholders which including faculty members, and students as well as data. In addition, e-learning opponents argue that incapability of e-learning environment to authenticate examination takers is one of the major challenges. E-assessment is an important element of LMS based e-courses, and student authentication is mostly realized as one of the major concerns for e-assessments. For this reason, the main challenge facing the security of e-assessment and the e-learning environment is how to authenticate students because unauthorized persons can access and manage information. In this work, we propose a novel security scheme that contributes in resolving this vital issue by introducing an efficient secure model for supervising online evaluation including e-assessment or e-exam. The scheme addresses this imperative problem by proposing a novel approach that integrates available databases authentication technologies in conjunction with elearning environments for controlling unethical behavior during e-assessment process. Moreover, the proposed scheme considers the continuous random authentication using students' information stored previously in the databases that guarantee identity and authentication. To validate our proposal, and evaluate its performances and effectiveness, an extensive simulation work is conducted over e-learning platform similar to Desire to learn (D2L).