IoT Smartphone Controlled Secure Submission of e-Assessments

Abstract

The emergence of e-Learning technologies in educational environments has brought up the need for new approaches to the assessment of attained skills, such as e-Assessments, or computer-based examinations. Despite of many advantages to this approach of evaluating students' practical and technical skills and greater flexibility with respect to space and time, many educational institutions disregard it due to practical challenges. The biggest challenge is the need for network access in order to submit the assessments, which introduces the risk of students gaining external help during examinations. Hence, in this paper we present the mechanism for transferring submission files of e-Assessments between two or more USB flash drives, without the use of personal computers or LAN/WAN access. The proposed system consists of an embedded server board and an accompanying mobile application for the management of data present on the USB flash drives inserted. The embedded server board performs the functions of reading the contents on the USB drives and sending its description to the mobile application through a private Wi-fi connection or by a USB to microUSB cable. The user can select one or more files/folders to copy/cut/delete from the selected USB flash drives to other flash drives using the proposed mobile application. By having four ports for connecting to four USB hubs, the system can manage a large number of USB flash drives at the same time, which enables a fast transfer of data in time-crucial situations.