Attendance to Massive Open On-line Courses: Towards a Solution to Track on-line Recorded Lectures Viewing
Enrique Canessa, Livio Tenze, Enrica Salvatori · 2013
Abstract—Massive open on-line courses (MOOC) such as those by edX.org are digital courses where thousands students are dispersed across the Internet. This new variant for distance learning opens many new challenges including the need to verify the real vision of recorded lectures same as we control the physical presence of scholars in a traditional classroom. We review here a precursor study on the effectiveness of the new Pinvox system (i.e., “Personal Identification Number by Voice”), that aims to ensure “on-line attendance ” by confirming that a particular student has actually listened to and watched a complete video lecture. The preliminary findings obtained during a trial period by students watching videos from home and enrolled at University of Pisa in Italy, indicate that the use of Pinvox can be one step towards, not only ensuring the integrity of on-line certification, but also to sustain student attention and memory retention. Pinvox is based on the injection of unique, randomly selected and pre-recorded integer numbers within the audio trace of a video stream that ideally would need to be identified by MOOC students.