Integrations, innovations and transitions: the University of Erfurt on the advantages of digital assessment

Background and context

Since its new foundation in 1994, the University of Erfurt has firmly established itself in the higher education environment, both nationally and internationally, through an exceptional cultural and social science profile. With its focus on religion, humanities, cultural studies, society and teacher training, the University of Erfurt is a centrally located educational and research institution that comprises approximately 6,000 students, about 100 professorships, as well as about 400 academic employees and 300 administrative employees.

The University of Erfurt has been using WISEflow since 2020.

The following text is a report by Professor Dr. Gerd Mannhaupt, Vice President for Student Affairs and Director of the Erfurt School of Education at the University of Erfurt.

A catalyst for change

I want to be clear about this from the start: the introduction of digital exams at Erfurt was not just the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had been discussing the digitisation of exams for two years before the coronavirus emerged. Colleagues who ran exams with large numbers of students, but had no technological support, were particularly in favor of it — many of them relied mainly on multiple-choice tests, and a digital exam is much easier to implement than pen-and-paper for that format. We were already looking for a solution.

Personally, I'd wanted to get rid of printed, written submissions for a very long time. In the past, all students had to send me an email with one or more PDF files: everything had to be submitted to me electronically. From my point of view, it wasn't just a matter of writing the exams digitally, but of digitizing the entire examination process. That was the decisive reason for switching, and is one of the main strengths of WISEflow. My research had shown there were not a lot of suitable alternatives for us. We chose WISEflow because it is much more than simply digital examination software for long-distance exams - we liked the automatic text recognition and the anti-plagiarism services included in our license.

Decision process and privacy policy

I don't think another open-source system will be developed that could even come close to matching the performance of WISEflow. When we first considered introducing digital exams, I asked the head of our data center, who is responsible for all IT matters, how long it would take to develop our own examination system. He said at least two years — and in my opinion, two years still wouldn't be enough. These are hand-crafted systems: if one lecturer says "I want it this way," that needs to be programmed, then the next person says "but I need something else." Every university that's tried to build its own system seems to reach the same conclusion. No university can single-handedly develop the features WISEflow already offers.

It's not just a matter of time, either - developing your own system requires a lot of resources. In terms of cost, WISEflow was and still is a comparatively inexpensive system. It would have been foolish for us to decide differently.

Very early in the process, we involved the State Commissioner for Data Protection ("Landesbeauftragter für den Datenschutz") as early as July 2020, before the first examination period. In the meantime, the Thuringia Higher Education Act has been amended to allow for digital exams; it now contains exactly what we need to execute our undertaking in a meaningful fashion. We've adapted our examination regulations too, specifying how digital exams are to be conducted. All of this is now part of the general, permanent examination policy at the University of Erfurt.

WISEflow uses AWS servers hosted in the cloud, with all processing taking place exclusively in encrypted form. The State Commissioner for Data Protection has audited and approved the process.

From my perspective, we learn weekly of some public facility that's been compromised in some way. No one now claims that servers should be located in Thuringia just because of that — you should never assume you're secure just because backups are stored locally. You can build a good local backup system, but local servers are only as secure (or insecure) as the servers AWS runs in Ireland. So what's the real difference? I'd say AWS servers are more secure, because there is greater security expertise there.

Adoption of the platform at the university

Eight weeks. That's how long it took from signing the contract in June 2020 to running the first exam on July 13. UNIwise staff told us at the time it was going to be close. What made it possible wasn't speed for its own sake — it was that we weren't starting from zero. Two years of internal groundwork, conversations, research into alternatives, and the case for digitising the whole process rather than just the exam itself, meant that when the moment came to move fast, we already knew what we wanted.

Colleagues at other universities who only started thinking seriously about digital exams once external pressure had already eased ran into enormous resistance from teaching staff. Some universities here in Thuringia tried to manage everything via attendance instead, because they'd never built the case with their own faculty.

At Erfurt, colleagues and students were the ones asking me, "When are we going to get an electronic examination system?" The idea had widespread approval already. Smaller programs would go along with it regardless, but the real work was winning over advocates in the larger programs running written exams for 300 or 500 students at a time.

The results speak for themselves: not a single incident during that first examination period, every exam written on the date originally set out in the March 2020 course catalogue, not one cancellation. 6,000 students used the system and were glad to get their certificates in September 2020 rather than waiting a semester or more. Students gave us a lot of credit for the fact that there were no delays, and we've had consistently positive feedback from them since.

Bringing the employees on board

Personally, I feel very confident with the use of WISEflow. In the beginning, I attended every available training session, and by now all our employees are up to date as well. It's important to involve all stakeholders during the implementation phase to really get everyone on board. Even if it doesn't correspond to the common belief, lecturers at universities essentially have a conservative stance. As innovative as their research may be, they are conservative in regard to structural questions - everything is supposed to stay the way it is, or even better, go back to how it was years ago. As I said, digital exams are the norm under our examination regulations, but the examiner of a master's thesis can also check a box on the digital registration form requesting a paper version.

In that case, students must submit a second version of their thesis so it can be marked on paper. That still exists, but it's very limited. At the Erfurt School of Education (ESE), this isn't a big problem. The main ongoing discussion is: what's the best way to correct submissions? In every modern workplace there should be at least one computer set up for a digital pen, with software better than Acrobat, on which someone can make handwritten corrections directly in the PDF files. That's how I do it - I have special software for this, and it works smoothly. I can read and write with it just like I do on paper.

If I didn't have that option and had to do all my annotation work with a keyboard and mouse, I wouldn't want to correct or edit digital exams either. But our data center has now introduced digital pen-enabled devices for marking, so more and more lecturers are using this option — which is why there are no more reservations.

Compliance with university regulations

According to our regulations, we have to store exams and papers for five years. Thanks to WISEflow, we're gradually getting rid of tons of paper from our shelves and metal cabinets — everything is being moved onto WISEflow's electronic archive instead. Now everything is neatly archived and available at any time, and under our license agreement with UNIwise, everything is deleted after five years, exactly as it should be. The physical archive system belongs to the past.

This feature, which we first became aware of during the presentation of WISEflow, was the decisive factor in our selection of the platform. I didn't just want a provisional system to get us through a difficult period — the consideration was, and still is, that we introduce a system here once and for all and maintain it.

It's also regulated in the examination regulations that, for master's or final theses, the submission of the paper version is no longer the legally binding hand-in date (we don't even want a paper version anymore) — instead, it's the date of the electronic hand-in. The deadline for submission is the end of the flow in WISEflow.

At one point, several students approached the Erfurt School of Education (the "ESE"), our Center for Teacher Education and Educational Research, of which I'm the director. They asked how final papers were supposed to be printed for submission when access to copy shops and printing services was suddenly limited. The ESE asked how we'd solve that, and I said we could do it via WISEflow without any problems. Bear in mind that most master's theses at the university are written at the ESE — 300 to 350 a year. That meant 350 students who couldn't easily get four printed copies made during that period. We simply set that up digitally at the ESE.

You can't submit papers by email — that's not legally possible. Digital exam documents have to go through WISEflow. Everyone is thoroughly convinced of its features by now: all faculties use WISEflow, and all master's theses are processed through it.

Advantages of digital exams for the University of Erfurt

1. One of the advantages of WISEflow as a system is that changes are relatively unproblematic to execute. You can easily extend the whole thing with an individual examination period. And another big advantage: archiving is no longer necessary. We had meters of exam papers in our archives. If you have a lot of written exams, you have a lot of paper. All that is no longer necessary.

2. Teachers can effortlessly provide students with the submissions along with their own comments. It is important to emphasize that according to a ruling of the European Court of Justice, every student has the right to a copy of their work with the examiner's comments. To comply with this, all you have to do is choose whether you want to share inline feedback with students. A simple click enables you to share that feedback easily. All in all, the efficiency of the system was simply compelling.

3. The enormous amount of time I save as a lecturer can now be used elsewhere. Grades had to be entered beforehand and checked again, then usually transferred to Excel. Such tasks have completely fallen away. Judging from my own experience, I would say that about half the reading time is being saved compared to handwritten exams. I always create essay exams, and digital papers are just much faster to read than handwritten ones. Currently we are working on making students aware that texts can also include a structure, and that they can work with headings. That is the next challenge. Otherwise, they literally write 1,000 words in a single block. There's not even a paragraph. That's just a win-win for all of the teaching staff, from a reading perspective.

4. Another advantage - cost savings. We save on infrastructure costs, say for furniture and equipment. A single exam period costs us as much as the WISEflow software for a whole year with all its accompanying customizations. We also save money because student assistants no longer have to deal with all the paper, not to mention printing costs. We used to have to print documents, exams and instructions for hundreds and thousands of students. That's all in the past. For us, the price of the system is one of the strongest arguments.