Facial Authentication before and after Applying the Smowl Tool in Moodle

Abstract

In this work, a facial authentication system has been included examined, deployed and evaluated for students who study in distance higher education. Until today, there was hardly any technology that verified whether the students are themselves the ones in the realization of their activities within a LMS (Learning Management System) as Moodle. Currently, there are different technologies that identify people. One of them is biometrical facial authentication, which permits the authentication and verification of users based on facial features. Thanks to the new technologies’ contribution within the educational community, there is a possibility to verify that there are not frauds and to avoid the identity theft while the students do their activities in the platform; in order to demonstrate that e-learning is as accepted and recognized as any other kind of education. The main objective is to check the functionality degree of facial authentication of the Smowl tool in Moodle platform, to identify the attention degree and opinions in the students’ understanding, as well as to determine which kinds of activities have more acceptance before and after using the tool. In this work, 100 Master students were audited for the survey and the conclusions reached indicate a high acceptance of facial authentication as a technique to improve distance education, and that this perception of students improves even more after experiencing facial authentication when learning through Moodle rooms.KeywordsFacial RecognitionDistance EducationLearn Management SystemIdentity TheftEducational Data MiningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.