Integrations, innovations and transitions: the University of Erfurt on the advantages of digital assessment
Context
Since its new foundation in 1994, the University of Erfurt has firmly established itself in the higher education environment, both nationally and internationally, through an exceptional cultural and social science profile. With its focus on religion, humanities, cultural studies, society and teacher training, the University of Erfurt is a centrally located educational and research institution that comprises approximately 6,000 students, about 100 professorships, as well as about 400 academic employees and 300 administrative employees.
The University of Erfurt has been using WISEflow since 2020.
The following text is a report by Professor Dr. Gerd Mannhaupt, Vice President for Student Affairs and Director of the Erfurt School of Education at the University of Erfurt.
A catalyst for change
First of all, I would like to start out with noting that the reason for the introduction of digital exams in Erfurt was not just the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. At our university, we had been discussing the digitisation of exams already for two years before the coronavirus had emerged. Colleagues who conducted exams with many students, but had no technological support, were particularly in favor of it. Some of them mainly use multiple-choice tests, and for these exam types a digital exam is much easier to implement than a pen-and-paper exam. So, we were already looking for a solution.
Personally, I've wanted to get rid of printed, written submissions for a very long time. In the past, all students had to send me an email with one or more PDF files: Everything had to be submitted to me electronically. From my point of view, it wasn't just a matter of writing the exams digitally, but of digitizing the entire examination process. That was the decisive reason for switching, and is one of the main strengths of WISEflow! My research had shown that, apart from WISEflow, there were not a lot of suitable alternatives for us. We chose WISEflow because it is much more than simply a digital examination software for long distance exams. We liked the automatic text recognition and the anti-plagiarism services included in our license.
Decision process and privacy policy
Right from the start we noticed that WISEflow has been developed by people from within higher education. Everything that you usually keep in mind as an examiner and lecturer at a university can be found in it. And you experience that right from the beginning. That's why I think that anyone who has already worked with WISEflow will not accept any other solution.
I don't think that another open-source system will be developed that could even come close to matching the performance of WISEflow. When we first started to consider the introduction of digital exams, I asked the head of our data center, who is responsible for all IT matters: “how long would it take to develop our own examination system?" He replied that it would take at least two years. In my opinion, two years would not be enough time. These are hand-crafted systems, so if one lecturer says, "I want it to be this way," then that needs to get programmed. And then the next person comes along and says, "but I need something else." All universities that have decided to build their own systems seem to come to the conclusion that two years are not enough. No university can single-handedly develop the same features that WISEflow is offering.
It's not just a matter of time either - developing your own system requires a lot of resources. In terms of cost, WISEflow was and still is a comparatively inexpensive system. It would have been foolish for us to decide differently.
Very early in the process, we involved the State Commissioner for Data Protection („Landesbeauftragter für den Datenschutz“) as early as July 2020, before the first examination period. In the meantime, the Thuringia Higher Education Act has been amended to allow for digital exams. It now contains exactly what we need to be able to execute our undertaking in a meaningful fashion. We have adapted our examination regulations as well. These specify, for example, in which way digital exams are to be conducted. All of this is now part of the general, permanent examination policy at the University of Erfurt.
WISEflow uses AWS servers hosted in the cloud; the entire processing takes place exclusively in encrypted form. The State Commissioner for Data Protection has audited and approved the process.
From my perspective, we learn weekly of a public facility that has been compromised in some way. No one is now claiming that the location of the servers should be in Thuringia because of these breaches - you should never believe that you're secure just because the backups are stored locally, right? Surely you can build a good backup system where maybe the last day's data is uploaded before a cyber-attack, but local servers are only as secure (or insecure) as the servers that AWS runs in Ireland. So, what's the difference? I’d say, AWS servers are more secure because there is a greater expertise in security technologies there…