Design and implementation of a fault tolerant web-based examination system for developing countries

This paper presents the development of a web-based examination system that focuses on automated resolution of faults such as power, network, or component failure that may occur when an e-learning system is used to conduct an examination. This system can withstand various challenges that hinder the adoption of e-learning technologies in developing countries. This is important because it will reduce the time and cost involved in conducting large scale examinations by tertiary institutions without the need to upgrade existing infrastructures. These institutions will not necessarily require uninterrupted power or network connection to conduct web-based examinations as the system can easily resume if such an incident occurs. The architecture of the proposed web-based online examination system provides for integrated management of functions such as question pool creation and update, examination monitoring, failure toleration and recovery, automated grading, and randomization. The system also eliminates the need for manual scheduling of examinations which requires much planning and is error-prone. Different examinations can be scheduled to run simultaneously. The design technology adopted for the implementation is a client/server technology. The incremental software development model in conjunction with prototyping technique was adopted in the development of the web-based examination system due to the iterative nature of the developed software. The system was developed using PHP, JavaScript, Ajax and MySQL. The system has been applied to conduct an examination involving more than 20,000 students per semester at University of Calabar. It has been proved to save efforts of teachers and students.