Desarrollo de Soluciones Cliente-Servidor para la Verificación ...

Abstract
The use of online learning applications is nowadays widely spread and still growing
due to the advantages that it offers. At World Wide Web there exist thousands of virtual
courses currently available using e-learning environments. Nevertheless there are some
lacks in current Learning Management System (LMS) that do not allow to provide virtual
educational environments with full traditional learning capabilities.
Some of the most important drawbacks in current LMSs are the lack of adequate tools
to actually guarantee that the student is who he/she claims to be, and to properly track the
behaviour of the students along the whole learning session. Traditional solutions, such as
login and password based authentication, and simple session logs where the interactions
between user and system are recorded, can not actually guarantee that the user is who
he/she claims to be, and even worse, they can not guarantee whether the user is or not in
front of the computer looking at the screen.
Biometry, on the other hand, refers to the emerging field of technology devoted to
identification of individuals using biological traits (i.e. physiological or behavioral traits).
Biometry has become an essential method for verification and identification tasks, that
offers wide range of possibilities, although it was ever linked with human identification in
access control tasks, or with the field of criminalistics.
In this Thesis we propose the application of Biometrics to the E-learning environment
in order to increase the security level offered by the access control module in LMS, and to
improve the monitoring process of student’s behaviour during the learning session. With
this solution, we intend to contribute to the LMS spreading, allowing the use of LMS in
environments where only traditional learning could be used until now, such as courses that
require hour certification.
First, we present the open source project BioWebAuth (Biometrics for Web Authentication)
(BWA), that is our solution to provide improved access control using biometric
features. Second, we present BioWebMonitor (Biometrics for Web Monitoring) (BWM),
that is the evolution of BWA, able to monitor in real time the student’s behaviour during
the whole learning session, in terms of attendance and attention intervals.
A lot of advantages are derived from the availability of reliable identity, attendance
and attention information by the LMS. Among them, more reliable hour certification in
virtual courses can be provided. As well, reliable information about student’s behaviour
is an important information feedback. This information can be used by the LMS, for
instance, to report about the complexity of some learning topics, to estimate the whole