#22 Help with SEB Deployment?

[Elizabeth Washington]

Hi There,
I am hoping someone can help! We are an online publisher and are beginning to host courses on our new Moodle Platform (v2.9). We are trying very hard to use SEB to help minimize cheating on student quizzes/exams. We like SEB and would like to offer it to our instructors who wish to increase exam security. We have certainly been successfully installing SEB locally, configuring the SEB config file locally, but we need to come up with a way to deploy SEB to students easily- eliminating confusion regarding where to go to install it and how to get the proper config file. We have read the online documentation and have done lots of testing. At this point, its seems we dont understand it enough to get it working in an easy manner. Are you able to provide some further guidance on how we can accomplish this? Ideally, we would like the students to have a link to install SEB WITH the proper config file when they view the exam in Moodle so they can accomplish this in one easy step. Is this possible?

To provide some background, we have enabled SEB in Settings > Site administration > Development > Experimental > Experimental settings. We now see the choice of 'Require Safe Exam Browser' to the 'Browser security' field on the quiz settings form. When you attempt to take a quiz/exam that is set up to use SEB, the following message appears: "This quiz has been set up so that it may only be attempted using the Safe Exam Browser. You cannot attempt it from this web browser." Is there any way for this screen to display a link to install/launch SEB WITH the proper config file?

I would truly appreciate any help you can provide.

Thanks, Elizabeth Washington :)

[Pascal Wyss]

Hi Elizabeth

At the moment it is not possible to ship/install SEB with a config file. But your students only have to do two steps:

1. Install SEB with the installer
2. Download and double-click on a configuration file to reconfigure the installed seb. This configuration file should point to a website (can be moodle) where you can provide exam-config files behind links. That way you have control which current exam files are on the website and whenever the student starts seb he directly reaches the website with the current exam configs.

Did that help you?

[Elizabeth Washington]

Thank you so very much for your reply. It certainly helps to know that we cannot push out SEB with the configuration file. Knowing this, I have 2 follow up questions.

1. Do you know if there is a way to include a link to launch SEB and/or download the SEB configuration file from the Exam start screen in Moodle? I saw an online video where someone had did this (as shown below). Do you know how this can be accomplished?

Currently, when SEB is required, we simply see “This quiz has been configured so that students may only attempt it using the Safe Exam Browser. This quiz has been set up so that it may only be attempted using the Safe Exam Browser. You cannot attempt it from this web browser”.

Attached is what we would LOVE to be able to accomplish.

1. We have installed the plugin for the SEB quiz access rule. (Dashboard > Site administration >Plugins > Activity modules > Quiz > Safe Exam Browser quiz access rule). Within this function, you can include a link to download SEB and enable the use of keys. I have just now noticed that the download URL link does not appear on the exam start screen until a key has been defined. Is the use of keys required in order to be able to direct users to the download url?

Does this mean you need a different config file for each and every quiz/exam in Moodle? Just trying to understand the logic behind this.

I tried configuring an SEB file (for exam) and entered the key from the SEB config into the quiz in moodle. I then launched SEB and the exam was still saying SEB required…..I am not seeing how I can make the connection????

Really appreciate your help and guidance.

Thanks, Elizabeth

[Daniel Schneider]

The first two questions you're asking are actually Moodle questions. We're only in charge of SEB, the plugins or code to integrate SEB with Moodle and other LMS / exam systems are not programmed by us. You should ask Moodle questions to a Moodle service provider, in the forum at moodle.org or hire a Moodle/PHP contractor to implement something similar as shown in the pictures you've sent for your customized Moodle instance.

We are nevertheless interested to add links to our website for such integrations for LMS and exam systems. Could you please post the link to the video you took the screen shots from? We could ask the people behind it if they would contribute their customizations as they look really promising (you can of course also try to contact them directly). I guess that they anyways have to publish the code for it somewhere to comply with the Moodle open source license.

For your other questions: Did you study the manuals and the SEB 2.x How To document carefully? We can't answer such general questions extensivly (only Gold/Principal members of the SEB Consortium get individual support from us), but shortly:

• You need to activate a setting for SEB sending the key actually to Moodle or another supported system, as the manual states:
  Send Browser Exam Key in HTTP header: This enables sending the Browser Exam Key in an HTTP header to authenticate the SEB client and its settings to a compatible exam system.

• The Browser Exam Key is used to make sure that an exam can only be used with the correct SEB settings and SEB version. Therefore if you need different settings for your exams, those will have different keys. You can also use the same settings for several exams, but then you can't start the individual exams directly from SEB but you need to use some exam portal page (which URL you use as Start URL in SEB) with links to those exams. This is explained briefly in the How To document mentioned above.