ICDE Member UoC To Lead Major EU Project TeSLA, ICDE Connected Through The Advisory Board

The ICDE Secretary General will be part of the advisory board of the European Union innovation and research project TeSLA (Adaptive Trust-based e-assessment System for Learning), which within a few years must enable students to be assessed online at the different learning stages.

The project is led by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and funded by the European Commission within the European framework programme Horizon 2020. It was presented on Tuesday, 26 January, at the "Sala Europa" of the Representation of the European Commission in Barcelona. The event introduced some of the main technologies integrated and applied in learning and that will enable this innovative assessment. The system, which will be prepared by the best experts in each field, will allow the student to be identified and authorship to be authenticated thanks to state-of-the-art technology such as facial recognition, voice recognition, typing patterns or anti-plagiarism, among others.

The TeSLA consortium comprises 18 expert organizations, including eight universities, both on-site and online, three quality assurance agencies, four research centres and three technology companies from twelve countries (Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Finland, Germany, France, Mexico, Switzerland and Portugal). In total, there will be a team of around eighty professionals and eighteen months of large-scale pilot tests with the participation of over 14,000 students from Europe.

The participating universities are the UOC (Spain), the Open Universiteit Nederlands, Welten Institute (Netherlands), Sofia University and the Technical University of Sofia (Bulgaria), the Open University: Institute of Educational Technology (United Kingdom), IIR Telecom Bretagne (France), the Anadolu University (Turkey) and the University of Jyväskylä, Open University (Finland). Moreover, the quality assurance agencies are the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (Spain), the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education AISBL (Belgium) and the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education EV (Germany), while the research centres are the University of Namur (Belgium), the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica Óptica y Electrónica (Mexico), the Fondation de l’Institut de Recherche IDIAP (Switzerland) and Imperial College London (United Kingdom). Finally, the technology companies are Protos Sistemas de Información (Spain), LPLUS GmbH Company (Germany) and Watchful (Portugal).

Accessible to all

Apart from the teaching and learning processes, the project works across the related ethical, technological and legal aspects, such as data protection. Moreover, it will be adapted for students with special educational needs. Once it has been developed, a standard free version of the online assessment system will be offered to education institutions and there will be a professional and commercial version for the international market.

The TeSLA project has emerged from an internal project of the UOC, which worked on it for three years. The UOC will coordinate the project given that, as an online university founded in 1994 with its own online learning environment, it has accumulated successful experience in e-teaching and e-learning processes.

View the project website here: http://tesla-project.eu/

View the project on the Cordis website: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/199103_en.html

Download here the TeSLA Project General Description