Law Institute of Victoria moves exams to the cloud with Elumina

The 160-year-old body for the Victorian legal profession has shifted away from printed in-person assessments, and moved the exams to the cloud, with the help of Amazon Web Services partner Elumina.

Elumina built an AWS powered solution for the Law Institute of Victoria (LIV), a membership association that provides education and advocacy for more than 28,000 lawyers in the state.

Now, LIV says it has achieved remote accessibility through the Elumina Assess app, which uses the Amazon Rekognition service for proctoring, with pretrained and customisable computer vision capabilities to extract information and insights from images and videos.

This is done to personalise the experience of test-takers, and to monitor for anomalies during exams. 

"People who are taking exams can be legitimately monitored and supported from afar," Kellie Hamliton, LIV's general manager of knowledge and learning, said.

"Accessibility of the Elumina solution on AWS, the fact that someone can be in Dubai and take our assessment on the same day, is huge," Hamilton added.

Andrew Parker, Elumina's vice president of customer solutions, said the biggest difference has been the apps artificial intelligence (AI) module.

"We've been able to use that to look at biometrics, [to] look at hand movements, look at gestures, so if they're legal professionals sitting their exam in Singapore, Mumbai or London, or even in Melbourne, it's the same experience now for the Law Institute," Parker said.

"For the Law Institute, the AI has been able to keep their costs down," Parker added.

"It's allowed them some flexibility around where the legal professionals sit the exams, and from our perspective, working with AWS we know that all the information we're collecting for them, and all the information in the assessments is stored securely in [AWS] data centres," he said.

Two other AWS services are consumed by the Elumina Assess App: the Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic File System (EFS).

Exam content for customers is stored by Elumina on ECS, which provides a fully managed container orchestration service that simplifies deployment, management and scaling of containerised applications.

Elumina's solution allows exams to be run around the world, as it's not region constrained.

"The great thing about AWS is that we can use AWS regional servers," Elumina's director of sales Garth Hehir said.

"Thus, our customers can retain sovereignty of their data," Hehir added.

This he said is an especially big deal when running high-stakes exams.

Elumina worked with LIV for three months to create the exam solution, a process that involved a workshop to determine the legal body's need so as to adapt the exam system accordingly.

Thanks to the Elumina solution, LIV says it has improved its observability and insights from assessments, and can use the data to analyse testing to identify gaps in skill developments and to evaluate the quality and alignment of questions.

Staff productivity has also improved with Elumina's solution, LIV said.

“The seamless nature and on-day delivery support of Elumina has made all the difference,” Hamilton said.

Now, a single LIV staff member can personalise the experience for 15–20 people taking an assessment by pushing a button. 

LIV offers individual high-stakes assessments annually, and is looking at making these on-demand, which would not have been possible with printed, in-person testing.

Sydney-based Elumina counts the Australian Federal Police, the NSW TAFE, Monash University, Thiess, and Mitsubishi as clients, among others.