Inspiration

COVID situation created completely unexpected conditions in the whole society The education sector is adapting to new reality learning remotely from homes with great success using a variety of tools and methods. Videoconferencing tools such as Zoom, MS Teams, Webex, etc have provided robust and easy acceptance for a wide variety of students and teachers. Preparing for remote exams has shown a number of limitations using existing videoconferencing solutions if we would like to optimize efficiency and provide sufficiently robust and secure approach. There are tens of millions of students and teachers with an immediate need to fulfil their study obligations in this year by remote exams, which creates the urgent need for the efficient solution.

What it does

Our solution provides a secure and simple video communication and supervision between student and teacher during group remote exams. It consists of three modes of operation, which can coexist in the same moment: Individual conversation between student and teacher in exam preparation phase, visual identification phase and later stages used for detailed supervision, clarifications or hybrid exams combining written and oral part. Group supervision enables observation of all video and computer screens in Gallery view and focus on individual without interrupting students. Group communication is performed when a teacher can communicate with a whole group. Simple selection and tracking of student activity using audio, video and screen is provided. Simple start of two way communication for oral exam or supervision by student or teacher. Inclusion of content sharing, chat, posts and other forms of communication.

How we built it

This unique video communications solution, optimized for remote exams has been created on top of our existing videoconferencing and learning solution MiTeam, created from open source components such as WebRTC, LRS, MongoDB, Meteor etc and already used in several universities and enterprises. Remote examination mode of MiTeam Rex, the target of this project has been envisioned as a response to Virus situation.

Challenges

In technical terms, the planned functionality is quite unique in technology and even more in the UX concept. We strive to find the solution which will be easy to understand and reliable for a large variety of students and teachers

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We succeeded to design and implement a solution, which is an elegant enhancement of the existing digital learning platform and provides an affordable and easy to use solution for critical remote education activity.

What we learned

We learned how to invest a large part of available time into conceptual improvements of UX, which resulted in minimisation of SW development time.

What's next for MiTeam

Productize and sell/deploy the solution as part of our fully integrated digital social and remote learning suite MiTeam. Build international partnerships in time, where COVID impact will coexist with a general need to support the digital transformation of society with more and more efficient learning, which can only be done in a largely remote fashion.