Transforming Education

When you face life-changing circumstances and adapting becomes necessary to survive, innovation is the best way to succeed. The pandemic forced the shift from offline to online education methods and also compelled the educational institutions to be able to conduct exams without the students being physically present in the classroom. Creating intuitive solutions to enable continuation of education and to prevent any fraud and malpractices during examinations has become a challenge.

The online proctoring system was our solution to address this challenge. The ask was to create a system which would allow the users to:

1. Conduct exams without the students and invigilator being present together
2. Monitor the students in real time and detect malpractices like copying, seeking external help etc.
3. Alert the invigilators to any suspicious behavior

We leveraged the latest cutting edge technologies like AI/ML and computer vision to detect if students were using smartphones, notebooks etc. for copying or were talking to anyone and develop an advanced AI/ML based proctoring system. The system also detects automatically if anyone apart from the student is present in the room. Basically, it’s like the invigilator being present with every student, no matter where they are.

If you thought that’s where the story ends, you’re mistaken. What started off as a basic system to conduct exams soon transformed into a solution which allowed users to:

1. Create question/answer sets of various types (subjective, multiple-choice etc.)
2. Create exams from the Q&A sets and assign students/invigilators to exams
3. Allow the students to raise doubts while the exam is on and for invigilators to address those queries
4. Save exam status in case someone gets disconnected or takes a break
5. Allow subject matter experts to evaluate the answers submitted by students and publish the results online

Some of the more important features of this solution are:

1. It’s an end-to-end smart exam preparation, conduct and evaluation system.
2. Use of computer vision and AI allows automatic monitoring for any fraudulent activity
3. It is hosted in the AWS cloud and uses auto-scaling of AWS services based on demand
4. It supports up to 20,000 concurrent users and can automatically scale up/down
5. Data for each client is separated from others and is kept completely secure

We were involved in the entire product management cycle. We helped shape this solution by conducting competitive research and advising on important features and product design. When the product scope was modified and new demands arose, we accommodated them during the development phase and delivered the best solution possible for this important use-case.

Now comes the part which satisfied us the most. Even though most of the team joined during the pandemic and worked across diverse locations, they truly rose to the occasion by bonding well and going above and beyond to create something wonderful. Considering that this solution is used for hundreds of educational institutions, we feel absolutely proud to be part of something which has ensured that the pandemic does not hamper education for thousands of students and maintain its credibility.

When something you create transforms lives, the joy is next to none as Truminds vision is to positively impact how people live, experience and operate in the Technology driven Digital and Connected World and what better way to live that vision than the innovations and solutions developed for the new use-cases during the covid-pandemic era.