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Tim Dutta Rahul Siddharth and Sujit Sama – Why Identity Verification for Online Programs
Matter
Tim Dutta: So, this is it guys, this is your last day, I hope everybody is having a good
time, I think, yes, front row, back row. It has been a long week but it has been a great
week for us, it's our first year here. We kind of faced a little snowstorm from the
East Coast, so we are not prepared for it. We had a few casualties, one of these guys
had a cold, but we are grateful to be here in this year’s conference and we are just
going to kick it off. My name is Tim Dutta, I am the CEO and cofounder of Verificient
Technologies.
Sujit Sama: I am Sujit Sama, the VP of bus dev and the fall guy for all those emails
that you probably received, and I promise you there is only going to be one more this
month.
Tim Dutta: Just one more.
Rahul Siddharth: And my name is Rahul Siddharth I am the Chief Marketing Officer and also
cofounder. First off, I want to start off our presentation with just a tiny tiny apology.
It just seems that we caused a lot of confusion, lot of sleepless nights by getting something
in your welcome kits, and we got a lot of questions about it, this little thing, lot
of people are puzzled what this is. You could try to open a beer bottle with it, pop open
a door stand, what else do we get?
Sujit Sama: Door stopper.
Rahul Siddharth: Door stopper, yeah, we got one of those things, but it's an iPad holder,
so you can pop it open and put your iPad on there or iPhone. We got something, one clicked.
But I want to talk a little bit about who we are and what we do. So we are Verificient
Technologies and we specialize in identity verification online through facial recognition,
and we have got a flagship software that's called Proctortrack and it's the only automated
remote proctoring solution for online test takers.
Tim Dutta: Today I am happy to announce that we are fully integrated and configured into
the Canvas platform and we are the only automated proctoring solution at a premier level for
Instructure. But we are going to talk more about that little bit later. As most of you
are already aware the growth of online education has exploded in the last 10 years, the rate
of 418% and continues to grow, year after year. With a democratization of education,
people are taking online classes all over the world and with technological advances
in the power technology, just in the last five years students are logging on from everywhere
and anywhere but we realize with the power of technology comes responsibility. Imagine
anyone with a computer anywhere around the world could earn a college education and change
their destiny. It's happening today. Today we are going to talk a little bit more of
a sensitive topic–cheating.
Rahul Siddharth: Cheating is happening everywhere. It seems like every day the blogs are full
of stories of people getting caught cheating, and I am sure a lot of you here in the audience
have great stories about catching cheaters and we would love to hear about them later
but think about all the cheating instances that we don’t know about that are ruining
the integrity of our institutions. Think about your honor code, you reputations, your brands,
those are all at stake.
Tim Dutta: Studies indicate that over 86% of students admit to cheating and getting
away with it, 86%. It's become an epidemic for high schools, colleges, universities,
even at the government level. For online degrees and credentials to have value we need changes,
what you guys need to change as institutions. Listen to Thomas Friedman of New York Times
as he discusses the challenges for online courses.
[Video display]
Thomas Friedman: The security issue, did that person took the course, take the test, etc.,
I think they will overcome that and the second is certification. Did you not just take the
course but did you learn something and can we certify that you learned something, when
they do I think this goes to scale.
Charlie: Sounds like a business to me.
[End of video display]
Tim Dutta: Charlie, it is a business, it's called Verification Technologies. We are the
only integrated solution at this platform that's a premier partner, we will tell you
more about that.
Rahul Siddharth: So let’s just play a quick game. Everybody knows this game here. It's
based on the data from our Proctortrack platform, based on 16 million impressions, top 6 answers
on the board, here is the question. Name a way that students cheat online.
Audience: Second monitor.
Rahul Siddharth: Second monitor, yes.
Tim Dutta: We have surfing.
Rahul Siddharth: Surfing.
Audience: Use of a cheat sheet.
Rahul Siddharth: Use of a cheat sheet from our data, 48% of the cheaters using cheat
sheet, someone else said something about–
Tim Dutta: Googling, surfing.
Rahul Siddharth: Googling answers, students are opening up browsers and checking out the
answers that’s all in the web, anything else anyone?
Audience: Having someone else take the test.
Rahul Siddharth: Having someone else take the test, good, good answer yes.
Audience: Working with a group when they are not supposed to.
Rahul Siddharth: What is it again?
Rahul Siddharth: Working with a group when they are not supposed to.
Audience: Instant messaging.
Rahul Siddharth: Instant messaging, all good good, answers . Our number 3 was getting a
help from a friend, so working with a group th ere, 11% getting questions before hand,
I want to spend a little moment on this. This is so important for institutions because the
way that students are doing this so that they are print screening, screen capturing the
questions and then handing off to their friends for later on, really important, and Tim.
Tim Dutta: It's very important because we are talking to the college board and we are
doing some work with them, and they have indicated to us that for every question they create
they cost them $18000. So you can imagine any question that's compromised and what it
costs in time and effort. We will get more into our technology how we help protect intellectual
properties.
Rahul Siddharth: Number 5 was they leave to look up the answers, right, in a testing session,
you have to be in a classroom but online if you are at home, you can always walk away
and last but not least, someone else takes the test. Now there is an entire black market
of kids being hired by other kids to take a test of them, so it's a bit of a crazy place
where online testing is. But one way to stop cheating is through identity verification.
Now the need for identity verification has become greater than ever. Now it's a strict
Department of Education requirement and compliance is now a big part of the mix. Now I am in-charge
to talk a little bit about government requirements, Department of Education compliance, I don’t
want to sound too wonky but if you can just hang in there, we are just going to go through
it, stretch out and bear with me.
So historically single sign-on was adequate enough to validate identity but it was too
easy to circumvent and there just needs to be another way to prove identity and attendance.
So it's required that students who register in an online program is the same student who
participates and completes a program and receives the same academic credit. So the Department
of Education requires institutions to verify the identity of the student who participates
in class or course work by using two methods. One is a secure log in and pass code, randomly
generated or proctored examinations or, two, or b, new identification technologies as they
become widely accepted, hint hint Proctortrack. So title IV compliance, has anyone read this
thing? It's a page turner. Requires institutions to provide verification that students attend a
course. So in order to be eligible to receive federal Pell grants for those students institutions
are now proactively trying to get ahead of the curve. So currently institutions receive
funds at the time of enrolment and attendance but if a student drops out in the middle of
a course or semester they need to return those unused portions back, so there needs to be
verification when the students participated and how much class they attended. This has
been a major challenge for LMS and institutions.
So to sum up, title IV compliance with Department of Education, I don’t want to ruin the ending
for you but here we go. An institution must verify a student’s identity, there has got
to be apostrophe. Must determine if the student’s academic attendance is related to the activity
and 3, must maintain sufficient record of the student’s academic attendance. So today
what schools need is a scalable and automated way to track attendance records and comply
with government requirements. Hint, hint Proctortrack.
Tim Dutta: Wait, it just gets better. So then there is financial aid fraud. The Inspector
General of the US Department of Education estimates that between 2009 and 2012 financial
aid fraud increased by 82%, 85000 students may have illegally received funds, that's
a total of $197 million in federal student aid fund that’s not accountable. Not surprisingly
distant learning is among the most in that number. A recent study by the Inspector General
audited 10 schools in how they fared in compliance with the financial aid. Want to
guess? Not so good. Now take an example of PennState. The audited students 13% of them–after
they audited the students they realized that 13% of students never returned the money once
they left the course, 26% of students dispersed money improperly and they couldn’t get it
back as a result of bad documentation of attendance, this is just one university and this is just
30% of their sample size. The total dollar amount $667 million at this one institution
gets, this is smidgen of a magnitude, you can only imagine what it really could be.
Rahul Siddharth: With all these challenges it's easy to get like Hulk angry about the
future of online education, so here are the major challenges in our lives, so one, preserving
academic integrity. In order for institutions to maintain the reputation and the brand in
the new world of online education there has to be a sure way to make sure that the work
is being done honestly. Two, verifying the student’s identities. How do institutions
know that the person receiving credit for the on line course is the same person who
completed the course as well as the assessments. Three, is privacy and protecting IP. What's
the acceptable balance between a student’s experience versus the organization’s right
to safeguard their online programs, while also complying to Department of Education’s
standards of identity verification? And last not but least the very very sexy compliance
how can online programs contribute to the affordability of education and comply to DOE
standards of stopping financial aid fraud.
Tim Dutta: Today there are a lot of options in the market place for online proctoring
solutions, they range from keystrokes, video, voice, facial recognition, fingerprinting,
IDs and other methods. Some use human proctors, watching people through a webcam and controlling
their desktop. It's intrusive, it's air prone and certainly not scalable. You know what?
Nor is this. I am here to tell you that we did things completely different at Team Verificient.
Our mission is to put an end to online cheating, we got a patent in technology called Proctortrack,
that delivers the world’s only proctorless identity verification system for online test
taking. Proctorless, that's right, requiring no human supervision, that's what makes our
technology automated and scalable. Sujit, show how it works.
Sujit Sama: Sure, we are a corny bunch but we take this very serious, cheating, we take
cheating very seriously as well as take our solution very seriously. So before we go into
this actual video demo this is going to give you a little bit of an intro on the solution,
so Tim and Rahul both mentioned facial recognition, so we use facial technology which is proprietary
to us to verify the identity of the test taker. We make sure and ensure that that student
is that student throughout the full length of that test. We can detect when the student
leaves the test session when they are receiving help from some during a test or if they are
simply replaced by somebody. We also restrict the student from using band applications and
performing key strokes, that may compromise integrity of the test.
So when we introduce our solution to some people or teachers, professors, people who
are in charge of online distant learning programs, the first thing that they think about is facial
recognition is intrusive, it's big brother watching. Actually we are probably the least
intrusive and most accurate solution in the market place, it's a student being proctored
by our algorithm, the only person who reviews the student test session is the professor
and that professor he or she only has to review those test sessions where a student breached
a test policy, we use that professor’s time most efficiently.
Let’s start the demo if you don’t mind. All right, we are going to have three flows,
the professor flow first. Everyone here is familiar with Canvas and how to create a quiz
on Canvas. Well, we are going to show how simple it is to enable that quiz within Proctortrack
or within the LMS to be proctored through Proctortrack. So here we are creating a simple
3-question quiz, it's called State Capital Quiz. Once that’s saved and published you
will see in the left vertical navigation Proctortrack and when the professor selects that it's going
to open up Proctortrack in the iFrame, you will see that quiz and simply all they have
to do is select the enable button to make that quiz proctored. So that quiz is now available
anytime anywhere for students to take and it will be proctored. So this is now we are
logging in as a student, the second flow, the students can log in, select quizzes
and take that test but before taking the test they have to go – if you pause for just
a moment – they have go to though a system check and they also have to go through an
ID verification process. Before getting started we just present some of the best practices,
so we recommended a private testing area, see it within the webcam, create proper lighting,
make sure all noise and devices are shut off, make sure your face is clearly visible and
there are no bathroom breaks. They are also some test parameters or I can figure they
will go through our CMS.
Beneath that is a little bit about how it works, we only allow one keyboard, one mouse,
one monitor, the student must close all extra browser tabs, sit in front of the webcam and
when the red frame appears around the screen, it means that their system is being monitored
and being recorded. We are transparent to the student at all times. So they must agree
to the recommended environment or that may lead them to fail the test and then they have
to download a simple application. This application is simply going to be run, it's not going
to be installed, so if they are running it in a laboratory, there are not going to be
any issues with firewalls and this application also has a band list of applications that
the student can't use or keystrokes that they can perform. We run an 8-point system check
to make sure and ensure that their system is compatible and once that’s complete we
do the first step of the ID scan.
We start with the face scan, along every step of the way we provide instructions, examples,
live chat, video, screen shots and we also have a 24/7 customer service center that's
ready to answer any student enquiries. So right here Lilly is going to take her face
scan. She is going to take a scan of the front of her face, the right and left side and she
is going to present a government issued ID and lastly she is going to present her knuckles
for a knuckle scan. The knuckles are as unique as individual fingerprints and just from the
camera alone we can create a unique match or confirm a unique match. So during that
time we present exam terms, don’t cheat, don’t approach any one, really don’t do
anything stupid, and once that’s complete the student must agree to the terms, enter
in their digital signature and then they will get access to the test. So the process takes
around a minute, so once the student becomes more familiar with it they actually go through
it much quicker and you can always reduce the steps in order to go through the verification
process, maybe you just want to do a face scan and an ID scan and you don’t want do
the knuckle scan.
Right now Lilly is in the test, so there is a red frame that papers oared the screen.
In this demo there is someone who is going to be assisting her. She is going to leave
the test session and then she is going to go on to Google and search for an answer.
We are going to show you we capture her screen and present it in thumbnails to the professor,
as well as we are going to show you intuitive the dashboard is for the professor to quickly
drill down and see when a student breached a test policy. So now the test is completed,
we are going to log in as a professor, we are going to select Proctortrack and this
time we are going to select State Capital Quiz. If you just pause it right here for
a moment, thank you.
So you will see Lilly’s test session and you will see that she had a score of 67%,
it's important but we are not suggesting the professor to look at the student session based
on their score, we want them to look based on their integrity level on how they completed
a test and in her situation, it's low. So it's proctoring by exception. So now we have
Lilly’s report, and beneath this you will see that there is a video feed and this feed
has time stamp violations when Lilly performed and infraction, so in this situation when
you click t hat button you will see the multiple person infraction, then you will see when
Lilly left the session, and then lastly you will see the screenshots of her screen when
she went on to Google. So as long as he said she said the institution of the professor
now has evidence that their student has cheated while taking the exam. When this is complete
beneath that you will see hardware report as well as we have information or we captured
motion and we captured sound.
So now it's up to the professor to make the decision on whether or not they want to pass
or fail the student based on how they completed the test not their score. If they pass the
student the grade then gets passed into Canvas. So again we take this very seriously and you
saw this slide earlier before, how do students cheat, the top six ways. With Proctortrack
we are putting an end to online challenges eating and we continuously make improvements
to our application and our technology.
Tim Dutta: Did we mention if we already haven't we are the only solution that's a premier
partner of Canvas, and one of the reason s why is that you will see we are automated,
we are scalable, we are Proctorless and let’s not forget there is no scheduling required
to use our software. Let me take a few minutes to just talk about we have been very fortunate
to work with some great innovative clients. We will take a few minutes to kind of walk
you through some of them. Some of them are democratizing education providing open access
to the masses and do upfront remediation to ensure that’s a lower dropout. So let’s
start out with one of the Canvas famous clients, eCornell. They have a certificate program
that is democratizing education, kind of taking away from the moves, it's a very exacting
program, it's 100% online, there are MBA level course certificates that are issued to professionals.
Let’s go to next one. Flatworld Knowledge. They are providing a most adaptive innovative
adaptive learning platform from mobile devices, competency based exams anytime anywhere, 65%
less across any educational program. Let’s go to another one. St. George’s University,
this is a medical school and they come to us to use our technology for their incoming
freshman class to do remediation exams, high stakes, if you don't believe me let’s hear
from Jon Modica at St. George’s University
[Video display]
Jon Modica: Verificient really went beyond our expectations when they were able to really
predict a lot of problems we had in advance. We really weren't sure what the end product
would be like and it was clear that they knew what were doing before we got it, first we
thought it was overkill too much functionality didn't really need
that much security but we found right away that students were constantly cheating
and finding really creative ways to teach and I think that Verificient system has done
really a good job of thinking of every possible scenario and making it not to intrusive for
the student. I think Verificient really is the only proctoring system that has the level
of security that we can trust at medical school to get the job done.
[End of Video display]
Tim Dutta: And we are just getting started. We have three products. We have Proctortrack
for higher education, we have ProctorIQ for pre-employment assessment and we have Proctorscreen.
I am going to give you a sneak peak of Proctorscreen, we are really excited to share this with you
because Proctorscreen for the first time in the market place is providing a solution for
iPads and enabling mobile devices to have anytime anywhere proctoring on the go. Let’s
give them a feel of that.
[Video display]
Narrator: Students can also take their test on the iPad with Proctorscreen. Beginning
by finding the test and browsing ideal test practices. After a quick system scan, we verify
the student’s identify with a facial scan and ID scan, a knuckle scan and a room scan,
instructions and examples are a touch away. After agreeing with the test terms and conditions,
a red frame appears on the screen to indicate that the student is being monitored.
[End of Video display]
Tim Dutta: Team Verificient we have created the most scalable and efficient identity verification
solutions in the market. Come talk with us, meet our heroes, some of our heroes actually.
At Verificient we are the missing piece needed to ensure the integrity for the online credential.
Rahul Siddharth: Thank you .
Tim Dutta: Thank you.
Sujit Sama: Thank you.
[applause]
Tim Dutta: We are taking orders in the back there is a 10% discount today, for you guys.
Rahul Siddharth: Does anybody have any questions? You sir in the back, yes.
Audience: How often are there troubles with the facial scan for [Indiscernible][00:24:01]
How do you resolve any errors?
Rahul Siddharth: Sure, great question, the question is how often are there troubles with
the facial scan for any of the technology.
Tim Dutta: So we have a three-part identity verification, we do the facial scan, ID scan,
and the knuckle scan, thus far we have done about 7000 assessments internally and externally
Q and testing, we collected a little bit over 1.6 million impressions, we look at 1800 impressions
of the student per minute, so when a student goes through a process what we do is we have
an onboarding test, so I think, Dennis, we just did that with you guys just two days
ago. What happened before a test starts, we work with the school and we gave a trial test,
2 or 3 questions for a student to understand a system and for us to have the opportunity
to understand their configuration, their hardware, their OS and we kind of like bounce around
that and make sure everybody connect and there is no issues. Thus far the major issues that
we had or come across really has usually been communication, so when it comes to FERPA and privacy
we don’t really capture a lot on the student except ID and email.
So what typically we have seen, students get confused with their personal emails versus
school emails, usually school wants to take on their school email, so it's more of a communication
that problem with the school that we have been working or trading around but thus far
it has been very smooth, we have an other product coming out and I guess you will get
his email in a month where we are going away from the flash, we are native OS, we will
go away from that, it's going to be like WebEx, everything is done on our browser, so we will
go away from flash instances.
Just a followup we have had a few situations where it was flash, there were some issues.
Another concern is broadband and low bandwidth, our next iteration is low bandwidth where
it's offline testing. If you could imagine the student downloads a test and they are
ready to go, whenever they want to take it, they open it up and it's lit, the screen is
lit, the background is lit, we secure everything locally and we pass it up 1 meg at a time,
it may take 3 hours, it might take 4 hours or it might take 2 minutes, depending on where
the student is. We have kind of done some trials with Africa and also in India with
the lowest bandwidth, so we have that, we are in beta with that right now, t has going
to be our next launch. Yes.
Audience: Afterwards do students see the report Audience: [Indiscernible][00:26:54]
Tim Dutta: Sure.
Rahul Siddharth: So the question is do the student see the report afterwards.
Tim Dutta: Sure, the student does not see the report, it's given to the institution.
We are very careful on security. Our two main goals is really for the student and also for
institution, fro the student we are providing a safe, secure and simple method of taking
assessment, so we are concerned, we protect everything in one server. For institution,
we are always concerned about their honor code, the integrity, their reputation, their
brand, we keep all that information locked up on their servers. When a test is completed
the institution will get an email where that goes to the professor or the integrity group
or the chair or the TA that say X, Y, Z session is complete and you had 136 students that
were registered of which 132 have completed, you are ready to review. We don’t send anything
on emails, everything is encrypted. The institution has to log in to our servers and they have
to go ahead and view the exceptions that Sujit mentioned, the thumbnails and see which students
had a low integrity score and they can open up, display and see what kind of violations
occurred.
Audience: What are some of our precautions do you have in place in case someone tries
to [Indiscernible][00:28:07] various purposes, stuff like that?
Rahul Siddharth: So what if someone logged in as–
Audience: Maybe some of the look like of your products and tried to use that [Indiscernible][00:28:25]
so you have to some way to verify that stuff has been installed is actually your product.
Tim Dutta: All right it's a very good question. How do we verify us? That’s a good question
I ask him every day, like how do I verify to you.
Audience: Our apps are assigned with Digiserve keys, so like served with high level software
manufacturers so they know that’s actually us, that's like a really big [Indiscernible][00:28:56]
Rahul Siddharth: And we are also registered with the Apple store.
Audience: Right.
Tim Dutta: And we are also integrated into app store of different platforms, like we
are in app store of Canvas, so it's a very difficult process to use, it's a safe key,
if we are not approved by Digiserve and when you download our app, it would come up on
our OS, from Mac and it will say, hey, this is a virus, this is unidentified, right, so
part of our technology in the work flow, we have to overcome that, and by doing that we
had to go through the process.
Audience: You are doing that online mode where you can take the test and then upload it later.
Is the offline mode something that Canvas approves or you created something to allow
Tim Dutta: Sure, it's good question, I will take the first part of it and Kyle you could
answer the second part as well. So when we integrate to Canvas or any other LMS we do
a handshake as soon as you start the verification process when we are in that iFrame, anything
before in creating the quiz and so forth is supported by Canvas. When you are in that
environment we support it and when we complete that Canvas supports it but the offline process
is really in analysis. Kyle, you want to–
Kyle: What was the second part of the question?
Tim Dutta: Who supports the offline?
Audience: –offline, taking if it's a Canvas quiz, how are you taking it offline?
Tim Dutta: Do we have to engage to this guy by the way?
[laughter]
Kyle: So we have some options for them before they get into the offline mode and we also
have a toll free number that they can call if they have an issue.
Tim Dutta: Was that the question?
Audience: Does Canvas offer offline testing mode?
Tim Dutta: Does Canvas?
Audience: Right.
Tim Dutta: Not that we are aware of.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:30:45] test gets executed locally by at the student’s location
if it's a Canvas test.
Kyle: So I could walk you through how to use their APIs and do some of the stuff but I
think it's probably out of the scope for what we are trying to talk about right now, if
you want to stay after, I could walk you through.
Audience: Okay.
Tim Dutta: Any other questions? Are you throwing us out. I think we have two more questions.
Audience: There is one quick, as far as mobile use, do you have both products or does the
product only work on the desktop or tablet?
Tim Dutta: I will take that one too. So it's for desk top and you have the iPad version,
you could do it for iPads or tablets but the primary one it's a dynamic and web response
but it's not going to give you what you need, it's two different products to our devices.
Any other questions? Thank you so much. We have one more, one more.
Audience: [Indiscernible][00:31:48] The record or video accept the report. Is that basically
all the instructor whatever it is just the exceptions, are you going to have access to
all the students or they would, but basically the exception for the control, trigger–
Tim Dutta: What's your name, sir?
Audience: Bill.
Tim Dutta: Bill, if you want them we will give that to you. Most institutions give us
exceptions but they have the whole inventory so it's depend on how we configure it, everything
we do, when Sujit gave you the test policies, what rules or breaches or so forth, we configure
in our CMS for you, so we would say you want this rule, you don’t want this rule, you
want this best practice, you don’t, I want all the reports in the ascending and descending
order, I want it in red, yellow, green, we can figure out with you when we first do the
onboarding test.
Audience: And how long is that available for you?
Tim Dutta: Did someone pay this guy to ask that question? No, I am joking, everybody
asks that, we hold onto the content for 30 days and if there is any type of requirement
for the institution, then we kind of do that on a case by case basis, we purge all data
after 30 days. Anybody else? Well, thank you so much, we will see you at the 80s party.
Thank you.