Hiding Lab Exercise in the Technical Education System: A Case Study (Oculto)

Abstract

Nowadays, it can be observed that computer laboratories in technical education system have encountered many challenges which prevent them to achieve their quality objectives. In a technical institution, the systems are maintained by the lab assistant/in-charge. One of their challenge is to monitor students’ experiments in the laboratory during end semester examination and to make sure that student cannot access to previously practiced experiments during exams.

To overcome this challenge and to help the lab assistant/incharge in further enhancing the quality of the laboratory exam, we have built an application an Oculto to hide and encrypt previous experiments from the students in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Anurag Group of Institutions, Hyderabad, India. The outcomes are successful and totally support the lab assistant/in-charge in additional boosting the productivity and effectiveness of the traditional practices thus helps academic institutions to reach a higher academic standard. Several directions for forthcoming improvements are possible. Among them, we can state: to be tested in the real time environment, where we can actually have the statistics of how the proposed solution improve malpractices by students and to find the impact on students' performance and support staff.