TRUSTID

The COVID-19 outbreak has created notable challenges to European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), which ought to sustain their educational and academic quality and reputation during the urgent transition towards to a completely online teaching and learning paradigm. One such crucial aspect is related to the continuous verification of the students' identity, classroom attendance, and therefore, adequate performance assessment of students. In essence, being able to continuously verify the student's identity, attendance and presence in online teaching activities is a prerequisite to offer trustworthy and credible online educational services, and of major importance in several online educational activities, such as laboratories quizzes or online examinations etc., in order to tackle the threat of impostors intentionally pretending someone else’s identity. However, a key issue in the majority of the recently online-transitioned education systems relates to the fact that they usually define a single entry-point authentication mechanism as a prerequisite to allowing access to protected resources and services. Hence, it remains questionable whether the user who logged in, is in reality the one who attends or fulfills the educational activities throughout the user session. State-of-the art approaches and existing solutions are usually designed as proctoring and invigilation tools only during online examinations with a person monitoring/identifying students remotely, which tend to be erroneous, do not consider the rest of the course participation and are not scalable. Hence, far reaching and innovative solutions are needed that could reinforce the ability of HEIs to offer credible and trustworthy digital education and improve their digital readiness with regards to the aforementioned challenges. TRUSTID envisions to design, develop and evaluate, following a User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology, an innovative continuous user identification and student presence solution, which will be open-source and will rely on a data-driven multi-tier framework that will consist of state-of-the-art intelligent image, voice and interaction data classification algorithms. The solution will be easy to integrate by HEIs through the provision of best practices and adaptable integration guidelines to system administrators. We will also adopt a GNU open-source policy of the development solution in order to enhance the sustainability of project results. Throughout the project, and after its end, we will disseminate the project results through multiple dissemination channels, i.e., three multiplier events, learning teaching training, scientific papers, project Website, social media posts and workshops. We will also create a knowledge repository that will consist of training webinars designed to inform miscellaneous stakeholders of HEIs on why, when and how to adopt continuous student identification solutions. The repository will embrace forums, best practices guides, system integration guidelines, validation reports and training materials that will be derived based on the project activities. The consortium consists of transnational partners who have complementary profiles, which are necessary to achieve the project's objectives. The applicant (University of Patras) has a strong research profile in usable-security and over 30 years of experience in applying UCD methodologies in various application domains and will coordinate the project, and will apply the UCD method throughout the project. Cognitive UX has developed innovative products and services on identity management and big data analytics, respectively. As such, their participation within the project's consortium mitigates the risk related to providing state-of-the-art solutions towards the achievement of technological innovation. Finally, the University of Cyprus and the University of Coimbra will serve as end-users and verification partners of the prototypes developed by integrating the provided solutions to their online courses. The expected impact of the provided solution is that HEIs will increase their digital readiness in terms of offering inclusive, trustworthy and credible online education activities through the provision of innovative and open-source solutions for continuous student identification and presence awareness. The open-source policy will allow HEIs to adapt the solutions based on their intrinsic requirements and needs, thus increasing sustainability of the project results and produced tools. We envision that the project results will further support HEIs to fulfill their mission and to ensure that their graduates have acquired the necessary skills and competencies through a trustworthy and credible online academic process.