ProctorCam, Toof says.
About 6,500 tests have been taken so far at a handful of institutions, Toof says. Individual students who want to take their tests via ProctorCam foot the bill for the service, which runs between $30 and $40 per test, but Toof says he hopes that schools will eventually incorporate the ProctorCam costs into their initial fees for online courses.
Besides facilitating the exam process, ProctorCam’s platform could ultimately help shed some of the negative perceptions surrounding online classes, Toof says. “The perception of online degrees is that they’re less than an offline education,” he says. “Part of the reason is people have this nameless and faceless experience with the institutions. We see our solution as a conduit to taking that less than personal aspect of an online education and making it a little bit more personal.”
All the proctors work out of ProctorCam’s South End office, as a quality assurance measure. “It’s 100 percent a platform plus a service,” Toof says.
The company has about $100,000 committed of a targeted $500,000 seed round, led by BzzAgent founder and CEO Dave Balter—also a backer of Boston-based mobile app developer FitnessKeeper. CommonAngels board members Maia Heymann and Peter Bleyleben have also expressed interest in investing in the company, Toof says.
ProctorCam is also planning on rolling out a new technology suite in the next three or so months. The firm also a handful of employees focused on development of the technologies. Toof kept pretty quiet on what exactly this software will look like, but said it “relates to academic integrity as a whole,” and that the company is working out how to cost-effectively provide remote exam proctoring on a much bigger scale.
As part of its bigger vision, the company doesn’t see the software interface as being limited to test taking at the academic level, he says. Think things like professional certification. “The big thing for us is that it goes beyond education as well; there are many applications for monitoring and assuring that someone is doing the task as outlined,” Toof says.
