E-exams in Norwegian higher education: Vendors and managers views on requirements in a digital ecosystem perspective

Abstract E-assessment has been supported in Learning Management Systems for decades. More recently, dedicated e-exam systems have emerged on the market, more specifically supporting the workflow and security needs surrounding high stakes exams. For instance, in Norway, LMS's Canvas and Blackboard are only used for ungraded assessment tasks, while e-exam systems like WISEflow and Inspera Assessment are used for graded ones. Since the systems are mass-market software, vendors must satisfy the needs of several customers, and needs that are specific to only one or a few customers will receive low priority, perhaps forcing teachers to adapt their assessments to what the tool supports, rather than having the tool adapt to the preferred pedagogy. So far, there has been considerable research on views of students and teachers on e-exam systems, much less on the views of vendors and managers. In this paper, we investigate what these stakeholder groups consider to be the key features of e-exam systems, and by what process they are determined. An exploratory case study was conducted, based on interviews with 12 participants belonging to three different groups: vendors, process manager and system managers in Norwegian universities. Our findings indicate much agreement among these groups about key features of e-exam systems, though observing that not all functionality requested by end-users will be prioritized. Also, there was much agreement that a movement towards standardization, open interfaces and digital ecosystems would allow smoother integration with other information systems in the higher education sector, and easier addition of plug-ins for specific functionality – but that there still is a way to go to reach the ambitions of a flexible ecosystem. Currently, vendors give more priority for adding functional features in e-exam systems rather than better interoperability, and integration with third-party tools remains a challenge.