AENOR: building trust among organizations and people

AENOR contributes to the transformation of society by building trust among organizations and individuals through conformity assessment services (certification, inspection, and testing), training, and sectoral information. 

It is the leading certification body in Spain. Over 87,000 workplaces worldwide hold one of AENOR’s certificates in fields such as Quality Management, Sustainability, Non-Financial Information Verification, Animal Welfare, Occupational Health and Safety, Digitalization, or Compliance.

AENOR provides training related to its activities through Campus AENOR, offering various courses, including its qualifications and master’s degrees. 

In 2022, Campus AENOR celebrated its 30th anniversary and became a reference in management systems training, with significant growth in the Latin American market. 

Over 150,000 students have passed through its classrooms in these three decades.

AENOR provides more than 500,000 Spanish, European, and international technical standards in sectoral information.

AENOR’s objective: Contributing to the transformation of society

AENOR’s goal is to contribute to the transformation of society by building trust among organizations and individuals and promoting the spread of good practices in values that are highly appreciated by the community, such as sustainability with an ESG focus, equality, and digitalization. 

According to the latest study, it provides users with superior brand awareness, which reaches 78% of citizens. 

Other factors that distinguish AENOR include having its personnel, allowing it to manage accumulated knowledge for the benefit of its clients, innovating in resolving new competitiveness gaps through proximity to knowledge sources, and its geographical and sectorial reach.

Training is one of the tools chosen to achieve its purpose, and specifically, online learning and proctoring have facilitated reaching a wider audience.

Barriers before proctoring

At AENOR, they know that the pandemic brought a paradigm shift in remote learning that is here to stay, opening new possibilities for the organization.

Before, it was unthinkable to avoid in-person evaluation for final exams of certain courses, such as master’s programs. Students were required to come to one of AENOR’s locations on a specific day and time.

This is an important consideration because many of their students, in addition to Spain, increasingly come from LATAM.

With proctoring, the barrier of availability for students has been eliminated.

Not only that, but it has also allowed the organization to offer different types of exams to its corporate clients.

Thus, AENOR started to integrate SMOWL proctoring products in its Moodle system for some of its own degrees and in its offer to its corporate clients.

Why did AENOR choose SMOWL?

“We chose SMOWL because it offered the functionality we required (being able to choose different types of supervision according to our needs) with the possibility of performing user identity verification with human supervision and manual processing (instead of automatic processing with facial recognition),” explains Diego Rivero, head of online training at AENOR.

SMOWL has allowed them to evaluate people who could not easily travel to the venues and who usually take their masters in streaming format.

They have also provided training courses to personnel from different companies worldwide with great success, generating confidence among the participating entities, detecting and demonstrating that those who take the exams are the same people that registered and that no irregularities have been committed during the test.

Benefits of SMOWL proctoring

As previously mentioned, AENOR chose SMOWL because it was the tool that best suited its needs. Although they especially highlight the following aspects:

• Identity verification during testing.
• Monitoring of activity during testing (control of open applications and potential irregular use of certain activities or documentation).
• Integration in Moodle LMS platform.
• Possibility of identity verification and facial recognition performed by humans.
• Located in the European Union, it complies with all GDPR requirements.
• Smowltech’s response to any support needs.

And, as Diego Rivero points out, it is “a very similar or even more detailed supervision than the one that could be done in person, covering our needs“.

A good reception to look into the future of training

AENOR students have been surprised by the novelty but have welcomed the implementation of this new tool. 

It has allowed them to take the necessary tests to obtain the qualifications from anywhere.

Corporate clients have also been satisfied with the initiative since, as AENOR points out, having a suitable proctoring system generates confidence.

For their side, trainers consider that once the system is implemented and tested, the use of the tool is quite simple, and they have the autonomy to use it and define it in the desired tests. 

Summarizing, AENOR believes that proctoring will be an increasingly used and essential solution in educational and official training environments.

Do you think the same? Try SMOWL and bet on a supervision system that is already part of education’s present and future.