Upskilling and reskilling employees pay off.
That’s why upskilling is on the rise in the workplace, which is great news for leaders in training centers and universities.
In a tight labor market, businesses have analyzed the financial, psychological, and administrative costs of constantly recruiting, training, and laying off people.
Among Learning & Development (L&D) professionals, 79% agreed that it was less expensive to reskill a current employee than hire a new one (Linkedin Workplace Learning Report 2022).
Furthermore, 46% of L&D professionals said that upskilling and reskilling employees were one of their top three areas of focus.
By offering upskilling programs, training centers and universities like yours are poised to reap the benefits of high enrollment, recurring demand for training, and profitable, long-term relationships with businesses in your community.
Naturally, you’ll want to meet this surging demand efficiently. Since the pandemic, and even before, you adapted your course offering to include more online training and assessments. To keep your organization cost-efficient, you chose to work with a learning management system (LMS) and remote proctoring.
In the process, you may have overlooked the benefits of using remote proctoring when assessing learners in your online upskilling programs.
If so, this article will provide a helpful reminder of what remote proctoring is and how it can benefit universities, training centers, and their learners.
What is remote proctoring?
In a remote proctoring solution, software and computer tools support or replace the work that a human proctor does.
Remote proctoring empowers your organization to do the following:
- Test knowledge acquisition remotely while monitoring exam integrity.
- Streamline the costs of in-person proctoring and increase your proctoring capacity.
- Expand access to your accreditation.
- Ensure compliance and protect the reputation of your certifications.
- Offer your learners the convenience of flexible testing times and locations.
What remote proctoring solution is right for you?
As with any ever-evolving technology, remote proctoring offers you a wide range of options for customizing how you want your assessments monitored. Making the right choice involves making trade-offs that best suit your needs.
Consider the following four most common testing situations and the respective option in remote proctoring we recommend.
1. For frequent, low-stakes testing, choose the browser lockdown
Upskilling programs may be based on the shadowing of an experienced colleague and include online training modules that may be shorter (i.e., micro-learning) or longer in duration.
In either case, frequent low-stakes testing is a valuable tool for assessing the learner’s knowledge. That’s where a browser lockdown, the simplest form of remote proctoring, is a sound choice.
In a browser lockdown, the learner downloads an app that controls their browser according to the requirements you set.
The flexibility you have in setting these requirements will depend on the provider you choose. For example, the proctoring app can oblige the student to disable a number of functions, such as new browser tabs, printing, and re-entry into the exam (so that the test must be taken in one uninterrupted sitting).
After testing, a member of your team reviews the proctoring data for unusual behavior. If you have a high volume of tests, this review will be time-consuming.
2. Upskilling many learners? Consider automated remote proctoring
Some organizations have a recurring need to upskill and evaluate many employees at a time. In such cases, automated remote proctoring is a sound choice.
In this solution, the proctoring software runs, observes, and records the test-taking session, based on your settings.
If the stakes are higher for these tests (e.g., compliance-related competencies), you may want to take advantage of an option to confirm the test-taker’s identity.
Some providers allow you to verify the learner’s ID card and face when testing begins. Better providers also offer flexibility regarding what you’d like to observe, lockdown, and record.
Automation enables you to proctor an almost unlimited number of test participants.
Once testing is complete, though, your team needs to review the recordings and behavior. Some providers may offer data review by trained proctors.
3. For high-stakes testing, remote live proctoring may be the answer
Upskilling, by definition, requires learners to stretch beyond their comfort zone to acquire new competencies. This stretching may add tasks to their job description that entail higher risk for their organization, such as projects involving compliance, health and safety, or fiduciary responsibility.
In such high-stakes cases, the organization supporting the learner needs to be entirely confident that the learner has indeed acquired the new competencies. Furthermore, your school or training center does not want to put its reputation at risk.
That’s when you may want to invest in remote live proctoring supported by monitoring software.
With this option, a certified proctor in a remote location monitors online the entire test-taking session. Should the proctor spot suspicious behavior, they can intercede.
Supporting the human proctor, the software flags any suspicious action and alerts the proctor to any inappropriate patterns of behavior.
Naturally, no online proctoring solution is perfect. If false positives arise, have diplomatic members of your team address them with the learner.
Providers of remote live proctoring offer a range of reporting options that may include complete time-stamped recordings, an overview of the test-taking with a variety of metrics, and the remarks of the human proctor on all the flagged behavior.
This trained human review saves your staff from reviewing many hours of video.
On the other hand, remote live proctoring demands the biggest investment among proctoring solutions. Furthermore, its scheduling is not as flexible and it’s not on-demand, so it does not scale easily.
- Need both scale and human vigilance in your proctoring?
Let’s say you need to remote proctor a significant number of upskilling learners. Cost efficiency becomes a key factor to consider, but given the stakes of the assessment, you want to maintain human review.
What do you do?
Choose automated remote proctoring with human review.
It offers two layers of integrity control: software monitoring and trained human review of the monitoring data.
How automated proctoring with human review works
Based on the settings you’ve defined, the automatic monitoring program manages the entire test-taking process.
Once installed, the proctoring app can do the following:
- Verify the learner’s identity before the test-taking session.
- Validate the physical and digital environment.
- Detect and prevent the opening of new apps, windows or tabs.
- Stop unauthorized software from running.
- Verify and control if a virtual machine or remote desktop app is being used.
- Record what’s on-screen, what the camera sees, and what the microphone picks up.
- Monitor for, and prevent, a second monitor being used.
- Inhibit certain functions like copy-paste, screenshots, and print screen.
This solution eliminates the time your colleagues have to spend reviewing test sessions. Plus, your test administrators receive the exam recordings and the report of a certified proctor who has reviewed the test data to ensure the learner is evaluated in accordance with the exam’s standards.
With upskilling on the rise, you want to be sure your online assessments continue to protect the integrity of your reputation cost-efficiently while also offering your learners the convenience of remote proctoring.
If you need any guidance in selecting a remote proctoring solution that’s right for you, we’d be happy to help.
