DETROIT – Even before the global epidemiological crisis, the adoption of educational technologies was growing at a fast pace. But when in early April 2020, the number of students affected by school closures hit almost 1.5 billion worldwide, online learning has quickly become all the rage, pushing the need for reliable remote proctoring to the front burner.
Edtech companies and educational institutions start building new proctoring platforms to offer a more dependable and secure option than Zoom. In addition to security, these proctoring solutions need to be able to support a growing number of users while delivering a seamless experience on a student’s device of choice.
Modern WebRTC solutions can ensure all this and more. Let’s dive right in to see how.
Ease of use
A sudden shift from a physical classroom to a virtual one has already put enough stress on educators and students alike. Not to add too many new hoops to jump through, an online proctoring solution needs to be user-friendly and simple to operate.
Since WebRTC technology is available on all modern browsers, you can bring real-time proctoring capabilities to any platform. To get a video feed, a WebRTC-based proctoring solution connects directly to a device’s camera, with no additional plugins required.
Superior scalability
During an exam season, the number of users of a proctoring solution can easily skyrocket to hundreds of thousands of students. This makes robust and reliable scalability a top priority for educational institutions and edtech vendors.
WebRTC is perfectly suited for real-time scaling and reaching massive audiences. Find a vendor with professional expertise to help you decide on the best topology, choose the right streaming protocol, implement a multi-CDN strategy, and employ performance-based proactive autoscaling to ensure stable operation under dynamic workloads.
Built-in security
By design, WebRTC is highly secure as it follows a multi-layered approach to ensure utmost protection of students’ data. First, all media is encrypted using a Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP), and DTLS-SRTP mechanism is leveraged to ensure safe exchange of encryption keys directly between peers. Further, the use of HTTPS protocol supports secure signalling and helps mitigate any MITM attacks.
For an extra layer of security, you can implement application-level safeguards including biometrics-based authentication, fine-grained permissions, and role-based user control. And end-to-end security testing will help you detect misconfigurations, IP address leaks and other vulnerabilities before they can ruin the user experience.
Advanced collaboration features
In terms of functionality, WebRTC technology is perfectly suited for online proctoring. Support your proctors and test takers with one-to-one video calls and multi-party video conferencing, WebRTC stream recording, shared digital whiteboards, seamless file exchange and data transfer, group chats, and more to ensure effective assessment and seamless exam-taking experience.
To augment human proctoring capabilities even further, employ intelligent ML-driven monitoring. By leveraging accurate face and object recognition and real-time video analysis, AI-enhanced proctoring helps educators streamline identity verification and detect potential cheating behaviors across thousands of concurrent test takers.
No vendor lock-in
Often vendors have the upper hand. Customized integrations, high switching costs, long projected duration, complexity and other issues make it difficult to discontinue using the services of one provider and switch to another. That’s what is called a vendor lock-in.
WebRTC is an open, well-developed standard supported and continuously improved by a community of devoted developers. Opting for an open-source technology means you don’t have to be constrained by a commercial vendor.
The bottom line
As the educational industry is shifting to online learning and online exams, the demand for remote proctoring platforms surge. WebRTC has all you need to develop a modern proctoring solution — from superior scalability to rich collaboration features to in-built security. And since WebRTC is an open standard, you get access to all the necessary features while avoiding the high cost of a vendor lock-in.
About the author
Olga Ezzheva is a technical writer at Oxagile, a leading software development company. A tech enthusiast, Olga covers a host of topics – from Big Data to Machine Learning to Computer Vision – while focusing on innovative ways to leverage technology for business growth.
