Using ODK as offline quiz/test paper collector?

Hello,

I have a relative who had problems being a teacher, within this time of pandemic.

Not all of their students are able to use/or have limited use of data/internet at home. And they're having problems collecting, checking and counting papers that are supposed to be submitted by their students.

Seeing that ODK forms can be downloaded(get blank form), answer the form at home disconnected from the internet, and submitted(send finalized form) at a later time with minimal internet connection.

They had asked if they are able to use ODK as an offline test/quiz creator to ease their workload in this time of chaos.

We had encountered some problems here and there, and I understand why (as I believe that ODK is created for survey purposes).

My questions for creating this post:

  1. Can we continue in using ODK with this (experimental?) project?
  2. (If I can) Could someone point me in the correct/right direction, if I want to fix some of the privacy/security issues we have encountered during testing of the project.

Nice to greet you @Neko_Acedia because the main objective of odk is to collect information and if the information is data from a student's exam, it will be a very good tool. so that everything works even better you can mount the odk server in Digital ocean. https://docs.getodk.org/aggregate-digital-ocean/. odk also already provides support at https://getodk.org/ and if you want you can write to me and I will help you.

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What specific privacy/security issues did you encounter?

In order for the students to download the quiz, we have given them a Google Account, that they will connect with the ODK Collect app (The email and password was shared to the whole class). The xml files converted from XLSForms of the quiz are uploaded on that account. The receiver(Blank Google Sheet) and the XLSForms are created in a different Google Account.

We have noticed that after a student submits their answers via ODK Collect, the receiver(Blank Google Sheet) is being shared to the Google Account that is created for the class. This gives the students access to their submitted answers, as well as the other students submitted answers.

The main problem(s) that we are currently tackling are:

  1. The students, knowing their classmate's answers, and possibly scores; could result into bullying those with lower scores.

Sure, we can help but what are the security/privacy issues you have encountered.

The privacy/security issue you are describing is a limitation of using a shared Google Account. The easiest solution is to use ODK Central because then only teachers can see the data.

If you want to continue using Google Drive as the backend, another option might be to give each student their own Google account. I haven't tried that myself, but it should work.

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Thank you for this response. :smile:

For now, as we are currently unable to have our own servers, we will explore ODK as quiz collector first using Google Drive as server.