SUMADI
Ensuring the Integrity of Online Assessments

“Entrepreneurship in its truest form is about identifying a gap in the market and creating a product of use to fill that hole and make people’s lives better.”—Billionaire entrepreneur, Richard Branson

Echoing Branson’s views is Raul Rivera, executive director of Sumadi, an Amsterdam-based firm that is helping education institutions, government agencies, certification providers, and corporations provide secure automated proctoring for online assessments through their AI-powered facial and typing pattern recognition, authentication, and browser tracking solutions. Sumadi—trademarked as Education Trademark BV has been in the education landscape for over 20 years. While working for a global higher education company and leading its team in implementing learning management systems worldwide, Rivera experienced the many challenges and demands of the online education market first-hand. “Because of the nature of my job, I was in contact with a lot of IT and academic professionals from different parts of the world, which gave me an idea about the needs of online education. During one of my visits to South America—an emerging market in online education—a former client approached me for a proctoring solution for the education sector,” reveals Rivera. Driven to help the client, Rivera looked for proctoring solutions that already existed in the marketplace. However, none of them were viable for the Latin American market. The biggest issue was the price and the complexity of the tools available.

The lack of an alternative prompted Rivera in 2017 to venture into creating an automated proctoring solution with his team of engineers. He then partnered with a few other educational institutions to test the proof of concept, following which, the team came out with a minimum viable product that was sustainable and scalable with whatever institutions in Latin America needed. “We then decided to commercialise it for an attractive price, which is when one of our biggest LMS partners saw the product and decided to promote us internally as well,” explains Rivera. “That is how Sumadi came to be!”

Simplifying Supervision and Information Validation

Today, via its innovative, secure, and automated proctoring platform, the company helps higher education institutions, government agencies, certification providers, and corporations around the world ensure the integrity of learning outcomes. “Our research has shown that the cost of location-based exams is high, and we are bringing an opportunity to reduce that cost with remote proctoring,” avers Rivera.

Sumadi’s success within the online learning and proctoring landscape can be attributed to three core factors: the assurance of equal outcomes without the bias against gender or race, the ability of the platform to seamlessly integrate with other testing platforms and LMS, and the user experience. “Sumadi has been created with the latest frameworks of development, not only at the backend but also the front-end, and delivers a very attractive user experience.

The company’s focus on customer satisfaction, their flexibility and malleability regarding technology, and their platform’s ability to seamlessly integrate with other platforms set Sumadi a cut above the rest in the marketplace

At the backend, we are beyond the proof of concept to be able to manage big scales or big concurrency levels of users utilising our platform,” adds Rivera. Sumadi takes pride in being able to offer an automated proctoring solution available in multiple languages, capable of being delivered concurrently at scale.

Scripting Successful Stories amidst the Pandemic

A testament to the company’s expertise in online proctoring is its success story with ICFES (the Colombian Institute for the Promotion of Higher Education, which is a part of Colombia’s Ministry of National Education). The client utilised Sumadi’s digital transformation to execute 326,000 online state exams. In Colombia, high school seniors are required to take an exam (the Pruebas Saber 11) to graduate and be admitted to higher education. Students with technical and technological careers and undergraduate students must also undertake specific exams (the Saber TyT and Saber Pro). Sumadi partnered with CognosOnline and Open LMS to deliver these exams online, on behalf of ICFES, to Colombian students—those located within the country as well as abroad. “As people endured months of COVID-19 quarantine and health restrictions banned universities from conducting in-person exams, the potential to impact the learning outcomes for millions around the world was affected. However, applications such as ours played a pivotal role in enabling testing to continue—regardless of the pandemic,” mentions Rivera.

The project involved the implementation of technology that enabled thousands of students to be assessed virtually through: a) a learning management solution, with high scalability that allowed for the creation of exams in an intuitive and accessible way and that could be easily adopted by those responsible for uploading exam questionnaires; b) a technology that would integrate with Open LMS and deliver academic integrity and exam security through online monitoring. This role was pivotal to the project’s success and was executed by Sumadi. “We supervised the exams while they were being undertaken by creating electronic academic files and identifying students who were not complying with the exam rules, such as a student attempting to open a restricted page, checking their smartphone, or speaking to a third-party,” explains Rivera. That is not all. During the exams, continuous facial authentications of the students were captured, producing records in an automated way, and generating alerts for evaluators in real-time.

This included capturing more than 181 million photographic records simultaneously. As a result of the partnership and the successful delivery of exams (which lasted up to five hours), Colombia became the first country in the world to carry out exams on such a large scale, online and simultaneously. “We are proud to have been part of this history-making project, working with ICFES, CognosOnline, and Open LMS,” states Rivera. “Through our AI and facial recognition technology, we ensured the integrity of the exams, allowing for a fair and impartial evaluation of all students, no matter where they were located.” Importantly, the project helped contain the spread of COVID-19 and kept students safe as they undertook their exams from home—enabling them to fulfil their assessment requirements and avoid significant impacts to their learning outcomes.

Paving a New Tech-Driven Path for Online Education

This is but one of the many success stories that Sumadi has scripted since its inception five years ago, all thanks to their multidisciplinary team of experts, comprising engineers, academics, and other individuals with over 10 years of experience working in operations. Besides, the company’s focus on customer satisfaction, their flexibility and malleability regarding technology, and their platform’s ability to seamlessly integrate with other platforms set Sumadi a cut above the rest in the marketplace. “Our focus is on augmenting the capabilities of our clients, and adding value that enhances the user experience we want to keep them and the supervisors happy,” adds Rivera.

"Sumadi has been created with the latest frameworks of development, not only at the backend but also the front-end, and delivers a very attractive user experience"

Worldwide, numerous higher education institutions, government agencies, certification providers and corporations ride on Sumadi’s coattails to ensure the integrity of learning outcomes. In fact, a testimonial from Milagros Morgan, vice president, Academic Affairs and Research, UPC (Peru), reads: “Sumadi is a technological solution that enables us to administer online examinations confidently. It is highly consistent with our educational model, where students are autonomous, self-reflective, and continuous learners. Sumadi is the result of a remarkable collaboration between international multidisciplinary teams, which adds significant value to our online programs and offerings.” There are several monitoring tools in the market but finding all the features combined with an easy and safe navigation environment for students is only seen in Sumadi.

As a part of its mission to modernise and simplify supervision and information validation for clients around the world in the most secure way, Sumadi’s next step is to evolve its product offerings. “AI is a game changer. We plan on leveraging it to create a technology backbone that would allow us to connect all of our solutions related to supervision. Remote supervision is the future and data protection is key moving forward, now more than ever. When you take that into account, there are a lot of opportunities for supervision products,” concludes Rivera.