Trustable Onramp Reports for Teachers

As a teacher I have students who must complete some of the self-paced courses in order to get credit points and I have to make sure that the student really has fullfiled that task by him/her self before I can give thoses credits.

So far I have let the student show me her/his MathWorks account and navigate there to the "My Self-Paced Courses" overview page.

Now I would like to make this process more efficient. I understand that the students can generate PDF progress reports or certificates but these documents are in no way secured or signed by MathWorks. Nothing hinders the student to cheat by editing his or her name into someone elses report. Also, there is only the name of the student shown and I am not sure if a fellow student could not just alter his or her name in the the account settings and then reissue the report for somebody else.

So, idealy I would wish for an encrypted and cryptographically signed report with the students email address in it.

Is something like that possible and I have just overlooked it? Or could you suggest an alternative strategie with similar safeguards?

Answer 1

[Chaitanya Chitale]

"My Self-Paced Courses" provides a way of creating a shareable link to the progress report. The progress report thus created is hosted on mathworks.com and users cannot change the text in this report.

You can ask your students to create a shareable link to their course certificate and/or progress report and to share the link with you instead of a PDF document.

[Jens Geisler]

That seems like a viable solution. Especially important is that the link is hosted by MathWorks.

My only concern would be that students haven't put their real name in their account. But I guess I could tell them to fix this if necessary.

Thanks!