As online learning continues to boom, online proctoring is becoming a more popular option for distance learning programs. Online proctoring is less costly, more personalized, and more convenient, especially when a student’s nearest proctoring center is 2 hours away. Unfortunately, Canvas does not currently offer the tools or API endpoints necessary to create a truly secure, online-proctored testing experience.
Our university's distance learning testing coordinator manages our distance students taking exams remotely, including online proctors. She have experienced that students may get disconnected from their proctors while the exam may still be running for the student. While the student is disconnected from their proctor, it is very easy for them to copy the test questions and answers to a document or to consult outside materials. It is very easy for a student to fake a network disconnect and then reconnect after they have gotten away with cheating. To secure an exam’s contents, She wants to assure that a student is not left unsupervised while the test is still accessible. Even the vendors that offer an advanced proctoring software have no built-in way of pausing or terminating an active test session in Canvas because that endpoint is not included in the APIs. Nor is there a way for the institution to do it through the Canvas interface. You are simply out of luck.
Our team would like to have a pause and resume feature that the proctor, instructor, or other system administrator controls. With this feature, any time a proctor loses access to the student’s webcam, screen, or the entire connection altogether, we would like the proctor to be able to pause the student’s attempt, preferably kicking them out of the test page. This will force the student to reconnect with the proctor before resuming.
After discussing this idea with our CSM, we understand that this is not a feature that could be developed in the current Quizzes, but we think having this feature or at least the end points necessary to control this through an external application would be worth developing for Quizzes.Next. Please vote that this feature get included on the roadmap!
