| |9 December 2016HIGHERReviewAssessment: The main reason for having invigilated examinations is so that you can be sure that the person taking the examination is the person that registered for the course. Even some online delivery providers require you to physically attend examinations. The use of image recognition and biometrics are certainly advanced enough to enable you to have confidence that the person sitting in front of the screen is the person who should be sitting the examination. But this does not address many of the problems that online assessment poses. What is to stop somebody else, "off camera" accessing Google and feeding the information to the candidate? How do you deal with different people doing the same examination at different times, thus risking the integrity of the examination?There are no magic answers that I can see. You could have a viva with every student but that is time consuming and not without its set of own challenges. You could set each student a custom examination. Generating these, and even automatically marking them, is possible but fairness across the student cohort could be questioned.A reliable way of assessing students in the online environment is still needed, which removes the possibility of cheating and which remains fair to all the registered cohort.Custom Degrees: Currently, if you want a degree you choose your insti-tution, choose your subject, sign up and you are good to go. But what if you want to take a module from one institution and another module from another institution. This might be due to the course content or because it is the world's experts that are delivering those modules. You might just want to customize your degree. This is possi-ble in a few circumstances but only if the two institutions have credit trans-fer option, and both institutions rec-ognize each other and the modules are able to fit with the learning outcomes so that one of the institutions is able to award a degree certificate.It would be nice if you could pick and choose your modules and build yourself a degree that is customized to your life goals? This is not currently possible and many problems would have to be addressed before it became so. For example, who would award the degree? If you only took a small number of credits from a prestigious institution, would they put their name on the certificate when the majority of credits were taken elsewhere? What happens with compulsory elements that are required for degrees that come with accreditation, for example in Engineering and Pharmacy?Solutions to the challenges above are possible without too much additional innovation. What needs to happen is that somebody puts all these things together and delivers a product to the waiting world. If there is a university that does not employ staff, or own buildings, but is able to deliver a high quality degree that could be a game changer for the HE sector, like Uber for taxis and Airbnb for accommodation. A reliable way of assessing students in the online environment is still needed, which removes the possibility of cheating and which remains fair to all the registered cohort
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