Preserving Privacy and Security in Online Assessment Process: Exploration and Analysis

The assessment process is an important part of students’ learning because it provides an opportunity to see what knowledge has been acquired and what skills have been obtained. When assessment is carried out in an online environment, which is currently becoming increasingly intelligent, integrating various predictive and analytical functions, the learner's behavior is tracked, the collected data is processed and analyzed. There emerge the issues of how secure the data is and whether its privacy can be maintained. This paper aims to summarize and analyze current scientific publications on how secure and data privacy-based are online assessment environments and to develop a conceptual model showing the possibility for realization of a trust-based assessment. To achieve this, a bibliometric approach and in-depth exploration of the content of relevant scientific articles is applied. The results show that an online assessment environment should be characterized by mechanisms for e-authentication, verification of students’ authorship, implementation of integrated approaches to data security in their life cycle, as well as the realization of appropriate methods for covering General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles.