EC funding project to identify and authenticate‎ post-secondary students

The European Commission is funding a three-year, US$7.7 million project to create an online evaluation system for universities.

The project, entitled “Adaptive Trust-based E-System Assessment for Learning”, or TeSLA for short, aims to define and develop an online assessment system, or e-assessment, that both identifies and authenticates post-secondary students in learning environments.

The system works to identify students and verify authorship of their academic work through a combination of state-of-the-art technologies, including: facial recognition, voice recognition, typing pattern recognition and anti-plagiarism algorithms.

The universities involved in the project are conducting several large scale pilot tests, with more than 14,000 students. The university leading the project is the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in Spain.

Participating universities include: UOC (Spain), the Open Universiteit Nederlands, Welten Institute (Netherlands), Sofia University and the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), the Open University: Institute of Educational Technology (United Kingdom), IIR Telecom Bretagne (France), the Anadolu University (Turkey) and the University of Jyväskylä, Open University (Finland).

Other institutions are providing quality assurance, including the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (Spain), the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education AISBL (Belgium) and the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education EV (Germany).

Universities providing research support for the project include: the University of Namur (Belgium), the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica Óptica y Electrónica (Mexico), the Fondation de l’Institut de Recherche IDIAP (Switzerland) and Imperial College London (United Kingdom).

The technology companies involved in project implementation include: Protos Sistemas de Información (Spain), LPLUS GmbH Company (Germany) and Watchful (Portugal).

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  European Commission  |  facial recognition  |  gesture recognition  |  identity verification  |  online authentication  |  schools  |  voice authentication