Enabling Respondus Lockdown Browser/Respondus Monitor

This document is intended to help guide an instructor in enabling the Respondus Lockdown Browser and Respondus Monitor tools from inside their Scholar course. For an overview of the functions of these tools, please begin with this article.

From inside a course, you can find the Respondus tools by going to the Course Tools menu, and locating the link for Respondus Lockdown Browser among the list of tools there.

Clicking on it will bring you to the main space for Respondus, which can lead you to a number of resources and tutorials provided by the creators of these tools. 

Once you’re ready, we can just click through to the tool itself.  You can also check the radio button labeled "Don't show this page again" to skip this page on later uses. 

Once you’re inside the tool, you’ll see a list of all the tests that have been deployed to the course so far. You can only add Respondus tools to already-existing tests in Scholar, as it does not provide tools for test creation. As a result, you need to create the test normally in Scholar before opening the tool; for a guide on creating tests in scholar, please see our video playlist here. 

(Please note when creating your test in Scholar, DO NOT alter the settings for adding a password or opening the test in a new browser window. Altering these settings in the Tests tool will interfere with the Lockdown Browser's ability to access the test.)

From inside this tool, we can then select the test we want to add the tools to, and select Settings from the dropdown menu. 

From there you’ll see the option to turn on the Respondus Lockdown Browser. If you choose to enable the Lockdown Browser, this will also unlock the ability to turn on and customize the settings for Respondus Monitor. Please note: the way these two tools are related to each other, you are not able to use Respondus Monitor on a test without first turning on the requirement for the Respondus Lockdown Browser, but you CAN turn on the Lockdown Browser requirement without necessarily enabling Respondus Monitor. 

You can also see a number of settings related to both Monitor and the Lockdown Browser that you can toggle on and off depending on how thorough you want the tools to operate.

For the Lockdown Browser, you can choose to lock students into the browser until they complete the exam, enable iPad use, or enable additional tools that can be used with the Lockdown browser, such as a calculator or specific outside websites. You will also see a setting for the Lockdown Browser that allows you to set a password to access the exam. 

For Respondus Monitor, you will have the ability to choose which steps the tool's startup sequence walks the student through, allowing them to select options such as requiring the student to show their ID or testing environment. 

In the advanced settings, you will also be able to set specific settings regarding facial detection, or some advanced settings, such as whether you wish to allow another application to make use of the microphone at the same time as Monitor. 

Once you’ve selected all the settings you want, you need to save those settings to the test in order to enable them. 

Once you’ve enabled those settings, you’ll note that the title of the test you’ve just added the tools to may be altered slightly. Enabling the Lockdown Browser will add a note to the title that the Lockdown Browser is on, while Enabling Monitor will add the “Webcam” term, as a way of notifying students that this exam will require the use of their webcam as well as the lockdown browser. At this time, we recommend you keep these additions to the test titles rather than try to edit them out, as they serve as an advance notice to students that the exam they are about to take needs to be proctored.