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Public libraries play a pivotal role in supporting education and literacy. They provide numerous services, activities, collections and resources for education and leisure. Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is an international renowned public library that provides numerous services for different users worldwide. E-learning is an emergent and promising method for teaching and learning different subjects such as the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The e-learning educational system is quite novel in Africa and the Middle East; hence, this paper presents the whole concept to the reader. In addition, it demonstrates number of e-courses tackling different domains provided by different educational institutions, national and public libraries worldwide.

In 2017, the BA inaugurated its e-learning services to cope with the new educational trend and to consolidate the lifelong learning concept in the community. The author showed special interest to the case of e-learning in the BA, as it is a regional public library. The main idea of this paper is to attract attention toward public libraries as a promising venue for e-learning implementation for general knowledge, library information sciences, soft skills, elementary and informal STEM education. The paper discusses in details e-learning and its characteristics.

In addition, the paper compares traditional education (face-to-face) with e-learning education, mentions both their pros and cons and recommends blending the two educational methods as they complement each other. Furthermore, the author has selected a sample of different STEM e-courses (203 different e-courses). These e-courses were selected to assert the possibility of presenting STEM topics in the form of e-courses.

This study would be one of the emergent research studies that connect e-learning to both STEM disciplines and public libraries. Additionally, this research highlights the importance of public libraries and all the services they provide. In the mean time, it shed light on the important and unique role of specialized librarians. Briefly, public libraries with all their resources, services and expert librarians could provide an exceptional e-learning experience to their community and be of great help to educational institutions and organizations.

The purpose of this study is to design and implement an intelligent online proctoring system (IOPS) by using the advantage of artificial intelligence technology in order to monitor the online exam, which is urgently needed in online learning settings worldwide. As a pilot application, the authors used this system in an authentic university online exam and checked the proctoring result.

The IOPS adopts the B/S (Browser/Server) architecture. The server side is implemented with programming language C and Python and stores the identification data of all examinees and their important behavior change status, including facial expression, eye and mouth movement and speech. The browser side collects and analyzes multimodal data of the examinee writing the online test locally and transfers the examinee’s most important behavior status change data to the server. Real-time face recognition and voice detection are implemented with the support of open-source software.

The system was integrated into a Web-based intelligent tutoring system for school mathematics education. As a pilot application, the system was also used for online proctored exam in an undergraduate seminar in Peking University during the epidemic period in 2020. The recorded log data show that all students concentrated themselves on the exam and did not leave the camera and did not speak.

During the epidemic period of the novel coronavirus outbreak, almost all educational institutions in the world use online learning as the best way to maintain the teaching and learning schedule for all students. However, current online instruction platforms lack the function to prevent the learners from cheating in online exams and cannot guarantee the integrity and equality for all examinees as in traditional classroom exams. The literature review shows that the online proctoring system should become an important component of online exams to tackle the growing online cheating problem. Although such proctoring systems have been developed and put on the market, the practical usage of such systems in authentic exams and its effect have not been reported. Those systems are heavyweight and commercial product and cannot be freely used in education. The light-weight IOPS developed by the authors could meet the need for online exam as a stable and practical approach and could contribute to the growing online learning and distance learning.