What's Peergrade?

Peergrade is a free online platform to facilitate peer feedback sessions with students. Concretely, it allows professors to create and manage assignments that will be reviewed and commented by students between them.

During that feedback session, professors can track all feedback shared between students as well as the progression of their students on a specific subject.

Thanks to an intuitive design and efficient way to improve students' learning experience, Peergrade has been able to attract numerous universities like UCL, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen Business School, Texas A&M University and others.

Although Peergrade is mostly used in and designed for higher education, it is also used in K12.

Peergrading is an alternative type of assessment

In our previous white paper, we already talked about peer grading and showed how efficient it could be for the learning experience. As we try to change the way exams, tests, assignments or assessments are given and taken, we obviously are very interested in alternative assessments such as peer grading.

That is why we first contacted the Peergrade team to understand their product better. We quickly became fans of their work and understood that our two products, TestWe and Peergrade, had a match.

After several introductions and discussions, we decided to team up.

What's the partnership about?

What we figured out was that we could propose our solutions as a package. You may need an e-Assessment solution like TestWe to optimize and digitize your assessment process on a global level, but you'll maybe need more tools to diversify as much as possible your formats of exams. Here, you can get Peergrade with TestWe.

On the other side, you may need Peergrade to test and change toward more alternative assessments, but you may also need a solution to help you manage on a global level the digitization of your assessment process and still use more traditional types of assessment. Here you can get Peergrade and TestWe as a package.

So here you go! If you have more question, simply contact us!

Check everything about Peergrade here

And on their social networks:
Facebook: here
Twitter: here
LinkedIn: here
Medium: here

• Svetlana Meyer is a cognitive science researcher associated with the Psychology and NeuroCognition Laboratory. She is also the scientific manager at Didask.
• Didask is a French startup, of Edtech (obviously), which offers an online learning method that has the particularity of offering a pedagogy anchored in the cognitive sciences."
• We particularly like what they do for the world of Education.

On March 13, 2019, Svetlana Meyer, Scientific Director of Didask, published Teaching Efficiency # 2: Beware of Misperceptions. First, we recommend reading it and even reading their blog DisDonc Didask.

But a term particularly caught our attention. The positioning test. As soon as we read the article, we called them and hosted them as part of our WeTestEd session podcast, especially to learn more about it.

So, what is a positioning test? Simply put, it is a diagnostic test that is provided to the learner before and after a learning cycle. The goal is to know what is the starting point of each learner before entering the learning phase and its point of arrival post phase.

Until then all is well, this kind of test seems to be extremely useful and adapted to a pedagogy that could be described as "agile", or comparable to the Innovation Classroom Don Wettrick.

However, it seems that this test is generally, and strangely, neglected by the community of trainers. Why?

"In this kind of entity, the trainers have two main objectives: on the one hand there is pedagogical effectiveness and on the other hand commitment/ engagement. Their fear is that the positioning test is perceived by the learners as a context of performance evaluation," Svetlana Meyer explains.

"In our opinion, it is not the positioning test that will trigger this feeling of being evaluated, it is rather the context in which it is given; the trainers facing the learner and the language used which can be the trigger. If this test is considered as a simple diagnosis, the learner will never feel threatened, " adds Svetlana Meyer.

Too bad! Especially that this type of test has many benefits. First, it allows you to precisely mark the learning process of each learner and this for two reasons:

• first of all this test requires a cognitive effort to the learner who will have to mobilize knowledge which is potentially already existing and which will thus reinforce the trace in memory associated with this knowledge there
  
• then there is what is called the illusion of control. As long as one has not tested his knowledge, one can have the feeling of being "super strong" on a subject whereas it is only when he will be confronted with a situation where he will have to mobilize knowledge that we will understand that this is not so much the case. Here the positioning test can clarify the learning for the trainers but also, and especially for the learner
  

The positioning test is, therefore, an evaluation model with which trainers and teachers should reconcile themselves with because its contributions to learning seem to be more than beneficial!

The lesson for this test, as for any other type of assessment of a learner (whether professional or student), is that it is important to work on the context more than the evaluation format.

A detail can make a difference. "When we look at the grade for example. We see a lot of debates on the grades, on the forms they should have: do we have to put a number, a colour, an appreciation, etc.? Whereas what matters is its context. If the context in which a grade arrives is competitive, then the student will feel it and adapt to it, " says Svetlana.

"The student will adopt a competitive posture toward others. He will feel his worth judged and will feel the need to protect himself from bad judgments. So all his attention will be captured by this need for protection against judgments rather than on his learning, "adds Svetlana Meyer.

There is much food for thought when we know that the stress of grades and exams is very high among students, especially in higher education, and that it is one of the sources of skills deficit.

On the menu, the state of Edtech in France and elsewhere, its problems and opportunities for the future. Has Edtech really succeeded in changing Higher Education for the better? What are the inherent problems of education that hinder educational innovation?

Many questions to which Rémy answered through his analysis.

TestWe: So what is the state of Edtech in France?

Rémy Challe: We are at the beginning of something there. 6 months ago I did not really know what it was for various reasons. But there is clearly a growth curve that is emerging. Now, although this growth curve is double-digit in France, when we look at the massive investments in India, China and the United States, you realize we French still have a long way to go.

France is a country of education! We must be able to support our entrepreneurs much more and not just send them to CES in Las Vegas, if not in a few years, the tools we will use will be Chinese, Indian, American etc. That does not mean that they are bad, they are just, I think, less adapted to the system of values ​​of the French education. French Edtech becomes almost a question of sovereignty!

T: What is the French value system? What are we claiming?

R.C: There is a form of universalism, France is also the country of Human Rights. In a very pragmatic way: the protection of data, well, it is not known in the same way in France, China, India etc.

And that, we must claim it, we must protect these values ​​and promote them in France and abroad. I sometimes meet entrepreneurs from the French Edtech who make 100% of their profits abroad. So that's good, it means that they export easily and that the "French touch" is successful, but it's sad at the same time because it means they have difficulties offering their solution in their own country, and that's not normal.

T: What is the feeling of the actors of Education regarding Edtech tools?

R.C: (laughs) Well, there are various feelings. First, here, I would not talk about continuing education/ professional training, because Edtech is widely accepted and there are fewer dogmas. We are dealing with actors who are companies that are going through periods of significant digital transformation, and Edtech is already considered as a solution that one must be armed with to train all members of a company.

When we talk about school in France (ie K-12) it's complex, because there is a market that is a public market. In France, it is not the professors who buy for example, which is not the case in China. And even if they want to buy an innovative and relevant solution to meet their educational needs and those of their students, it is not they who will pay.

You want to sell to a primary school, you have to go to the commune, you want to sell to a college you have to go to the department and for a high school, you have to go to the regional administration. And then the one who decides is not the one who pays, the one who pays may not be the one who will use the solution, and he may pay for someone else to finally use the solution, so you see it's a little nightmarish.

And then there is more dogma. First, there is the argument that education is free while there is always someone who pays in the end, and then there is always a kind of a distrust of the private sector. There is often this vision of entrepreneurs as sharks of finance when in reality it is far from being the case. In Edtech, we find almost exclusively entrepreneurs passionate about Education or people coming from the world of Education who seek to solve real problems. Whatever happens, we do not go on this sector for greedy purposes.

Finally, there is this third silo which is that of Higher Education. Here we find private actors, public actors. Generally, in Higher Ed, there is a general awareness that Edtech could greatly help. This position is explained by several factors. First, there is an appetite for innovation, there is a climate of competition that pushes institutions to innovate. And then there are these 20-year-old students, who use their smartphone during their classes. So the question is not how to ban these tools but rather "the learner that faces me is not the same as one was twenty years ago, so I must adapt. " So there is a change of posture expected but also a change that is inevitable.

Basically, we are moving from a time when the teacher was the only holder of knowledge to a time when knowledge is everywhere and we just need to know how to access relevant information, a time where we must learn how to learn and the teacher plays a determining role there above. The teacher must become ... well, a coach.


TW: What do you think about teacher autonomy?

R.C: There are programs that the teacher has to follow, it's clear, but after all, teachers have a certain pedagogical freedom and you have to have that freedom, through which you can choose your own methods, your own textbooks, and so on.

TW: In the Finnish way? In Finland for example, teachers have total autonomy ...

R.C: So we're not there but besides I do not even think that we should replicate this model in France. Finland is Finland, and then it's a smaller country, the scales are different, the traditions are different. On the other hand, in France, there is still pedagogical freedom. The problem is that it is not at all extended to innovative solutions. So perhaps we should give more freedom to teachers as to their pedagogy, their methods ...

In Higher Education, on the contrary, there is more freedom! In the development of programs, the choice of methods ... that's why it's a space that interests me and that can perhaps by capillarity, disseminate this educational freedom to K-12.

So yes, there is a resistance to change, but as I said earlier, awareness is already there.

T.W: Let's get out of the classroom and talk about Education as a whole and more structurally. There is a crisis of Higher Ed that looms on the horizon, especially in the US and the UK. A financial crisis but also a crisis of knowledge via the skills gap phenomenon. What do you think?

R.C: So first, the situation in France is not quite comparable to the Anglo-Saxon situation. Firstly, because Education is "free" when we talk about universities for example, or costs a few hundred euros.

TW: On the other hand there are also more and more students going into the private sector, like business schools

R.C: That's right, there are these schools of commerce, communication, engineers where the costs are relatively high. To be clear, the cost of a student at university (about 13,000 euros) is about the same as that of a student in a management school.

So for the university, it is the community that pays and it's great, and in the big management schools it is the learners who pay and it's not stupid either.

So yes there is a student debt that exists but it remains very far from American or British cases, so the crisis that can be seen in these regions does not exist in France ...

TW: But can it exist?

R.C: It's a fact, tuition fees have increased significantly in management schools over the last decade, they have almost doubled. And yes to start in life it can be a ball to the foot.

Now there are lots of support programs and alternative programs like apprenticeships where it is the companies that pay for students who are also paid between 1,000 and up to 2,000 net euros per month!

Also, we must also not fall into the cliché of prestigious management schools as the places where we find exclusively rich spoiled brats! There are sometimes more diversities in the grandes écoles than in some lecture halls at the university. Even in the grandes écoles, one can have access to scholarships, one can work alongside his studies, one can borrow from the banks if need be.

While it is true that the costs increase, I do not think they can still go up, contrary to what others think, it would not seem reasonable to propose schools at a 20,000 euros yearly tuition fee.


T.W: And the return on investment remains positive?

R.C: Yes it is still positive, now ... It is not exactly the same either compared to 20 years ago. The more graduates we have, the less value our degree has in away. So hiring wages are probably less efficient than 20 years ago.

But I do not believe that the crisis that you seem to announce with reason will arrive in France. On the other hand, there are points of vigilance, we must be careful, education is not a commodity, at least not like any other, we must not fall into a trap as it can be observed in the United States. or elsewhere.

According to UNESCO, in 2030, more than 400 million students will enter universities compared to less than 99 million in 2000, so that's a more than 400% rise. The problem is that it means we need more and more universities to open or new ways to manage that many students.

See the problem? No? Well.

University rankings are a symbol of elitism. Generally, no one ever looks past the first 150 universities ranked on the list and most of the times, these are all from developed countries (mainly the US, China and the UK).

Knowing that most of the young generation is coming from Africa, the Middle East or South America or Asia, these rankings don't help existing institutions in these continents even if lots of them are incredibly innovative or give effective learning programs.

• It pushes these universities to adopt elitist measures to try to resemble universities from the ?upper class club?
  
• It doesn't provide a real opportunity for students to envision a future they'd like to reach if, for example, they don't have the means to get to American expensive institutions or if they just don't want to travel thousands of kilometres to study abroad

Rankings as they are, propose a grim future. With the growing population going to universities, does it mean some will have to study through online learning only and via poorly engaging MOOCs while the richest more lucky ones will have the chance to access physically to the ?best? campuses?

It shouldn't be like that.

These rankings aren't appealing to students

?I'd be curious to hear if one student ever found his university good, or even decided to apply for a university, according to its ranking,? says Victor Wacrenier, CEO and co-founder at Appscho, a French startup that provides a campus management app.

It is true that students consider these rankings as essential in the decision-making process, according to a QS survey, 70% said so. But the main reason is that rankings seem to be indicators of employability. It stays elitist.

According to this survey, students are either over-relying on universities rankings, either need more metrics to understand what university can be the best for what they're searching for.

There is currently a rethinking of universities' values as institutions providing skills and a culture of learning rather than access to jobs. ?It is a shift toward Lifelong learning? as says Patrice Houdayer, Vice-Dean at Skema business school. Rankings should thus adapt to these new values and propose appropriate guidings for a new generation of learners that have completely different expectations of their experience in universities and after.

In Conclusion, rather than spending massive amounts of money to go up or stay up in the rankings, universities should adopt another strategy and invest in pedagogy and the campus experience to make sure students are trained enough for having a life long learning discipline, skills for their future career. Naturally, these students will take care of the reputation of the school.

Rankings are needed though, but they must take into account much more variables like eco-friendly standards, pedagogic standards, innovation standards or campus experience standards. Accreditations are already on the move, so should rankings.

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Or follow Diane

That's the real challenge here. At TestWe we're particularly fans of Vox videos. We're fans of how they make it easy to understand complex subjects. We decided to try to do the same.

We're going to analyze Education, the problems of its system, its new pedagogies and methods with the help of experts we're going to interview!

The challenge here is to make the complex world of Education understandable for students as for professors and entrepreneurs.

We hope you'll like it, we're going to do some in French, other in English, but always with subtitles! Be ready, it's coming soon!

You should definitely take a look at We Are Peers, the French provider of collaborative assessment system and peer learning management system. Or for more inspiration, have a look at what Don Wettrick has done with his students through his Innovation Classroom!

Assess by Teaching

Why? Because studies show that students put in the place of their professor, that is, making themselves the provider of knowledge, help them to better learn.

What you can assess here is the precision, efficiency and concision of a student's presentation to his peers as well as how well others have understood one subject. This formative assessment encourages communication between students and to that, we can only say ?YES?.

Quizzes

Why? Because Quizzes are a perfect formative assessment that can be multiplied throughout the year, which gives the opportunity to have access to data on students' learning.

Moreover, quizzes are very engaging for learners and bring interactivity and entertainment to the class. A very good example of a working solution is Wooclap. This Belgian startup makes smartphones great learning tools! A professor creates quizzes that will be sent to students' smartphones during the class. The result is that it has been proved that it helped students facilitate long term memory.

Roleplay

Why? These are the most engaging assessments through which learners impersonate a situation to show what they have learned? in action! Concretely, it's learning by doing. Thus, it gives an on-the-spot look at how much learners developed their skills. Here's a study on the benefits of roleplay assessments!

Pecha Kucha

Why? Pecha Kucha is a Japanese method of presentation in which you must present 20 slides while spending not more than 20 seconds per slide. Efficiency, being straight-to-the-point, Pecha Kucha are assessments that can put under the spotlight skills that are very much required on the job market today. Here's our study of it!

eAssessments

Why? Because it's the most hybrid solution for assessments. Because it works with alternative assessments, it works with standardized assessments and it provides data on the learning process, indicating professors what to do to improve their pedagogy and better adapt their assessment/learning experience. Plus, eAssessments provide flexibility to professors who can manage their exams as well as learners who can take their exam on their own device, anywhere or anytime. TestWe? well? is a good example ;)

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese method of presentation in which you must present 20 slides while spending not more than 20 seconds per slide. This method, in fact, is full of learning opportunities for students. Here's how.

1. It engages students in their presentation

"Obviously, students have to be concise in their arguments and learn by themselves how to convey people in a limited amount of time," says Keith Pond. Precision and efficiency are of great value. PechaKucha, more than any other traditional methods of presentation, engages the student in his project.

Through his work, students will have to understand the concepts and information they'll have to communicate, repeat many times to ensure a clear flow of information and eloquence. This work and repetition are engaging, and engagement is great to ensure long-term memory, that is, learning.

2. Easy to grade, easy to communicate

Giving a grade on presentations like these is not difficult. Variables are here. Better, inviting students to peer grading can be a great opportunity for learning. Indeed, it has been shown that peer grading could trigger active learning more easily.

Moreover, it is also very easy for students and professors to communicate with each other on presentations and what they understood from it. It is thus a great opportunity to engage everyone to communicate, get feedback on practical points.

2. It develops pragmatic skills that will help them professionally

Finally, Pecha Kucha is a great assessment model to test skills that are most needed in the job market. Knowing how to communicate clearly and efficiently is one of the most demanded soft skills today. Indeed, according to Dr Poonam Madar, a lecturer at the University of West London, Pecha Kucha is an assessment, a learning tool and a great way to prepare students for their future jobs. A three in one method that just can't be neglected!

According to Keith Pond, ?you can address different elements skills with different sorts of assessments, rather than expecting undergraduates to know just how to write an essay. You've got to train them through these elements,? and that is how they acquire skills that will greatly help them in the job market.

We posted an article last week, talking about the rise of hybrid jobs on the market and its impacts on higher education. Have a look at this chart from Burning glass technologies and you'll understand.

Here you go.

Obviously, the impacts that hybrid jobs will have on higher education are many and changes are needed in terms of learning/ pedagogy, of internal organizations. Basically, as Joseph E. Aoun writes, "If the new jobs that are emerging are increasingly hybrid, then the programs of study may need to become hybridized as well."

Let's dive a bit deeper into how a university or a school could prepare its students for these new kinds of jobs.

1. Propose projects and learning paths that aren't siloed

Although it is already changing today, learning paths are still very much siloed. If you're a student in History, marketing, finance, biology, you won't be able to learn or use knowledge from other fields to discover and propose solutions to problematics.

In fact, as Joseph E. Aoun explains in his article, it is much more enriching to base learning on problematics rather than on a defined field because it is the way students are going to be confronted to different kinds of situations in the real world.

Having access to one particular kind of knowledge isn't a problem anymore, knowledge is available almost for free at any time, anywhere. Thus, it is about using different kinds of knowledge to solve problems. This is one of several skills that are at the core of hybrid jobs.

A good example of a structural and pedagogical transformation, from siloed to hybrid education, is Finland. From their youngest age, students don't learn subjects, they don't take courses, rather, they take part in projects around themes and problematics.

2. Insufflate a culture of a growth mindset

As Jennifer Gonzalez writes, ?most teachers know that one of the best things we can do for our students is to help them develop a growth mindset, the belief that they can get smarter through effort. But many teachers are at a loss for what exactly they should do to promote this mindset.?

The growth mindset is the idea that the brain has the ability to change throughout your life, writes Katie Brohawn. Already very popular in the entrepreneurial community through expressions like every mistake is an opportunity to learn, it is still hardly applied to higher education where performance is perceived by students as the end-goal over learning.

Teaching a growth mindset to students can have positive impacts on them in terms of methodology, engagement and retention. Gauthier Lebbe, Inbound Marketing Manager at Wooclap, a Belgium startup that makes smartphone engaging learning tools, proposes 5 ways to help students develop a growth mindset.

3. Propose Innovation Class

We previously talked about Don Wettrick's Innovation Class and the opportunities it offered for higher education.

• Innovation classes help students to engage a lot more with the learning process.
• They help them develop a high curiosity for problematics they want to solve.
• They also help them develop a high expertise in a short time that is quite remarkable. They help them use tech tools and new practices to attain their goals.
• Finally, they help students to work together on projects and manage goals they set themselves.

Innovation classes match 100% with what is needed today on the labour market and in new functions such as hybrid jobs.

4. The Growth Tribe model

Growth tribe is the first European academy of growth hacking based in Amsterdam. More than growth hacking, the academy trains people from all ages to master a mindset that will them adapt fast to many kinds of hybrid jobs.

Seeing the rapid growth of this academy in such little time (2 years), it is interesting to analyze its case and extract ideas and structures that could be applied to higher education institutions.

What works as hell with Growth tribe is their project based learning pedagogy. The academy is contacted by companies (generally large companies) who need to optimize their processes, solve problems or attain certain goals. Thus, learners form teams and apply immediately what they learn through conferences and discussions.

What's more interesting in the Growth Tribe's model is the culture of data, feedback and optimization learners need to integrate in order to be able to benchmark their learning or adapt to those many situations where they'll have to solve companies' problems.

An academy like Growth tribe not only provides its learners with a large panel of skills, it ensures the companies with which it works that its ?students? have a high mastery of these skills and are adaptable to many complex situations. Many find full-time jobs in these companies afterwards (or get promoted in case of a professional formation).

5. Hybridize the administration of the institution

Finally, going back to the argument of Joseph E. Adoun about the need for institutions to hybridize their learning programs, we can go even further. Institutions can change their own internal process and organization to entertain a continuous improvement of their learning programs and a perfect match between what their students learn and the current and future needs of the market.

It means building teams of administrators, like a growth team, that could benchmark the market and latest innovations in order to adapt the curriculums accordingly. It means also training its faculty and administrators to get the skills needed to help students evolve and learn quickly. This a basic of hybrid functions.

We'll go deeper into that question in our next post. Keep in touch!

1. Slack: Ease communication, ease your day, save time

Communication between professors and administrators can be hard. Communication between professors and students can be also quite messy. Generally, all of them happen on one messy platform, the university's email platform. Clearing this up is thus a priority. Slack is the best friend here. Originally, the tool was labelled the startupers way of communicating. Now, it's an awesome giant com' tool that could be used by any kind of group. You can automate message, separate groups via channels, ensure private conversations, set up notifications in a cool and user-friendly environment.

2. Sense: Optimize marking and feedback

Sense is a very interesting company with quite amazing technology. Basically, the solution analyzes all the assessments you have received and detects patterns out of them. With these patterns, Sense gives you several profiles of answer that will represent faithfully a whole lot of copies. Say you have 7 profiles, you'll give feedback on 7 types of personas rather than thousands. Now, you say thank you and we say no worries.

3. Domoscio: Automate your data visualisation reports

BigData and adaptive learning seem to be at their debut in Higher education. Nevertheless, more and more institutions understand their importance. Generally, when we interview schools and ask about it, they say? Yes, but it's a hassle.? Understandable, collecting data manually, giving it a sense and interpret it in order to improve learning is a formidable, hard task. That's why there's Domoscio. Basically, they automate data collection and update data visualization reports. They offer more than that, check them out!

TestWe in fourth?

TestWe can also help you at automating grading, optimizing exam creation and getting data out of them to improve learning. But that's for another time?

It is a tough thing to do for deans although the reward is more than interesting. It's all about having efficient processes.

Although it's a hard time for faculty to adapt and play the game collectively, it is an even harder time for accreditation managers.

Indeed, we asked more than sixty accreditation managers what were their most annoying pain points. 83,3% of them told us their most difficult phase of accreditation was the implementation of processes and data collection phase.

Two problems stood out: 37% said getting everyone on the process to be involved was their biggest challenge. 51% said data collection techniques were the one challenge that made their day? well, not a good day.

In the meantime, it is important to remind that this function is still significantly new in universities' structures. With tech coming into the game and the growing importance of reputation internationally, accreditation managers will see their job greatly evolve through the coming years.

How? How can they get through these pain points and ensure AoL? We asked these questions to Keith Pond and Stephanie Lambert, director and administrator at EOCCS, a promising and innovative accreditation and a part of the EFMD group.

The institution's brand strategist

Accreditation managers have access to data. A lot of data. They collect, centralize, simplify the visualization of these data for directors.

They have a viewpoint on everything. ?Having a lot of data is great, but what do you do with it?? says Keith Pond, ?they must wonder how do they maintain data, how to use it in management decisions.?

And that's where the role of accreditation managers is getting very much exciting. They could be seen as the spearhead, the strategic brain of an institution.

?Higher education is becoming more and more like a market. Thus, the accreditation manager has got to be very strategic with accreditation. He's the one who knows how to show that university in its best light.?

Opting for one accreditation or another, thus, has a concrete significance. Whether you want to be part of the elite with the triple crown, or whether you want to show you are innovative and provide online courses with EOCCS, or whether you want to show your deep attachment with ethics with PRME and learning with ABCSP.

According to Keith Pond, in the end, it's the whole university's identity and image depend on what the accreditation manager thinks could be smart to do. More than just the accreditation, "data collected by managers are now used for the school's marketing."

More implication on the learning experience

The need for measurement, for qualitative and quantitative data on the learning experience (reflected by students surveys, team excellence frameworks or teaching processes) are at the heart of Assurance of Learning (AoL).

AoL is a process and a methodology for continuous improvement in learning, it is also an indicator of how well you do with your students. There, an accreditation manager will be more and more important and implicated in the "what you do with data. That's what an EQUIS panel will ask you when they come to your school," Pond adds.

"For EQUIS, accreditation managers are responsible for proposing ways to use data in order to show improvements in the learning experience."

"So definitely, the accreditation manager is going to become a far more important role in those institutions that want the reputation and that want to recruit students from outside of their local area," Keith pond affirms.

Simply put, a lot of schools are going to need to put this position at the heart of their decision making, their pedagogical and their marketing strategy.

Nevertheless, this position still faces a problem of recognition in schools. "Accreditation managers are far far more important than they ever used to be, but I'm not sure if universities are very good at seeing academics and administrators on the same level. You have academics and then there are administrators," Pond says.

In the survey, we conducted with sixty accreditation managers, one of the issues that made difficult data collection and interpretation was that it was hard for them to get everyone on the same page and get help the right data from everyone.


The game-changer

In conclusion, the ever-evolving position of accreditation manager is going to get more importance in schools' structures. It is in the interests of these schools to help them facilitate the decision-making, the analysis and the use of learning data for AoL.

Innovation and tech can play a role in it. That is one of the visions of EOCCS. More innovative initiatives from schools help at two things: improve learning and ease decision-making.

Hence the deep attachment of this one-of-a-kind accreditation that provides schools with strategies and guidance to achieve this goal.

This is where tech tools can help, not by trying to replace pedagogy and trigger the "dark version of a tech-based Education," as Keith Pond says, but by helping academics and administrators like accreditation managers to improve the learning experience.

In the case of the latter, it would mean save him time to ease the data collection, letting him more time to focus on the big challenge: "what to do with data."

If you're an accreditation manager and feel sometimes in difficult times with your task, fear not, your voyage is full of promises and excitement.

The breaks in the system
"There are several breaks in the system that will be the big triggering of a change in teaching in Higher education," says Kristin Palmer. Institutions will shut down, students not finding jobs after having completed their master degree, a growing brain drains from Asian universities (notably South Korea, China and Japan). Indeed, it is estimated that more than 500 000 international students will be studying in China in 2020 (the country is already second in terms of international students getting a degree there behind the US). This general context has 3 consequences that schools have to take into account. "There is this argument that Higher education has three disparate goals" affirms Dr Palmer, "creating new knowledge, creating well-rounded individuals and creating people that can do jobs".

The thing is those goals aren't always interlocking well with one another. "It would be great for institutions to differentiate more upfront what goal they're after". By not declaring what speciality a school is focusing on, everything becomes general and because today, the majority of schools declare ensuring a holistic experience, mixing the three goals, which is much more difficult to ensure although possible, 1) students can't find themselves a path on the professional market and 2) many schools will have to shut down.

Talking with Dr Palmer is enriching. Her views are critical, well thought as well as optimistic. Her knowledge and vision of tomorrow's Education and tomorrow's teaching, although coming from an American person, can be greatly inspiring for educators in other countries. Really.

According to some studies, due to social pressure and the need to get good grades to get higher-paying jobs, students tend to develop highly pressuring anxiousness and tend to focus only on their grades which, according to a study, tends to prioritize memorization over learning.

Worse, they tend to choose the easy path, that is, a diploma where they could get better grades and chances to find a job in the end. No more interest for real learning, for building expertise on what they love. And we push them to act like it.

Nice.

Thus we have a deeper problem here. There is no connection between learning and grades (and assessments). To answer this problem, new methods of assessments have been developed. Among these methods is the use of other forms of grading and assessment methods like engaging assessments, mastery-based learning or self-assessment teaching.

These innovative methods are invading the world of Education and are proven to be effective.

However, grades and assessments as we know them won't get out of the Higher education's horizon soon and it's not a bad thing.

Why they won't get out?

Simply because grading, in all its forms, helps to understand the competencies and masteries of a student on the labor market. That, we know.

Still, because there's a gap between learning and grades, the goal should be not to erase them, but rather to unite them.

We're getting there.

While new ways to grade and assess are rising and growing in importance, we still need an environment to make sense out of it, to manage these grades and integrate them into the learning process in order to help educators analyze them and improve the learning experience.

Hence, e-Assessments. These solutions are not new, on the contrary, they're quite ancient. They help you digitize your assessment processes, they optimize grading time, they propose secure environments.

Addressing these issues is interesting but e-Assessments are not really solving the problem and grew to be considered a slow and quite a crowded market?

It needs a little evolution.

Because e-Assessment in its core has everything to be that platform to manage to learn with grading, to manage the learning experience and keep an eye on competencies acquisition by students.

It lets professors manage competencies per test, lets them optimize their grading, manage their tests schedules.

Add to it scalable data visualization (student, group of students, class, program etc.) and that is how you make e-Assessment a tool to focus on learning using grades.

Add some spices, bring up tools to automatically give advice to students on their learning based on the grades they had.

Finally, make it adaptable to any kind of assessments, even self-assessments, and you have a platform adapted to today's students.

In France, there are debates about whether a digital education is relevant, whether tech in school is only a matter of "trendy thing". It is true that Education shouldn't be about tech.

Nevertheless, giving the chance to better educate and better managing learning through tech, now that's unavoidable!

That's a fact, according to our study on a hundred school deans and directors, 50% said digitizing their processes was unavoidable, 50% said it was urgent. 75% said using new assessment techniques was on their agenda, adding data management as a criterion they need to improve for learning.

e-Assessment is evolving and shows the opportunity to solve the grade/learning issue and give the right shoes to students in order to let them break records. We just need to give it a look and give it a try.

What do you think? What's your solution to solve the grading/learning issue?

Hey! Take a look at our new white paper on the problems with assessments and grading, we went deeper and analyzed the new ways to grade and assess students!

This is Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter. He does magnificent video essays on several subjects going from political and economic analysis to film and art analysis.

His videos became so popular that his editing style influenced many, many, many Youtube essayists..

Apart from delivering interesting learning content on so many subjects, Puschak is inspiring for a teacher who wants to innovate and propose other formats of assignments or projects to his students.

We wrote here a study on video essays and how it is a powerful tool for Education.

Don Wettrick's StartEdUp Innovation

Now, this is Don Wettrick. His pedagogical approach is totally innovating, disrupting, incredible.

Wettrick is proposing very promising methods of assessments, grading and students' self-development. So much that it turns Education upside down.

You must follow his blog here and vlog here and here.

We wrote another study about his methods, notably the ROTH Ira process he uses with his students that kind of resembles Growth hacking.

Believe us when we say this man helps students exploit their full potential, master skills and become experts, activists or entrepreneurs in various domains.

It's just impressive and inspiring. There's nothing better for teachers than watching examples like this.

Cult of Pedagogy

This blog is like a cave full of treasures. Founder and Editor in Chief of the blog Jennifer Gonzalez (that' her below) gives with her co-authors passionate and resourceful insights and interviews on Education's most interesting innovation as its most alarming issues.

Jennifer Gonzalez is a gem for every teacher, education innovator or student who wants to go further, to know more about what's going on in the alternative side of Education.

Her interviews gather true entrepreneurs of learning who experiment learning techniques with their students and met success. Gonzalez's (and the other writers of this blog of course) interviews and reports will inspire you to act as soon as possible. Simple, just subscribe to Cult of Pedagogy.

Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss is kind of a growth hacker, master of processing things in order to accelerate learning.

To summarize his accomplishments, apart from launching successful businesses and investing, he wrote several bestseller books and became a Chinese kickboxing champion, among other things, using accelerated learning techniques.

We really recommend you to follow his blog, you will find interesting methods you could try to implement with your students.

Accelerated learning is an incredible domain that everyone should study.

Vox and Vox - Borders

Vox videos and blog offer a superb analysis of current affairs and many diverse subjects (like the (Mostly) true story of hobo graffiti you will definitely learn something great here). Vox is a media that investigate a lot and that try to go deeper than the rest.

The Vox - Borders subchannel is (for us) even more interesting as the Emmy-nominated journalist Johnny Harris (below, swimming between Haïti and the Dominican Republic) goes at borders between two countries and analyses the geopolitical situation (cultural, social, economic, etc.) and its impact on the culture and the day-to-day life of people.

This learning content is a resource and a blog you should use to try to innovate or to propose new sources of knowledge and discussion in class with students, as well as new formats of assignments and group projects.

There are many other content and resources you should take a look at, but these ones just slapped us in the face. We leave you pleasure to take a look at them and enjoy this late Summer period.

Learning analytics is a vast, vast area in which we find very different tools accomplishing very different tasks. Still, they can be considered as Learning analytics solutions.

Let's remind ourselves that Learning analytics is the application of data collection, analytics, measurement and reporting to Education with the goal of improving and optimizing learning and learning environment for students.

I'd like to stress the word "optimizing" because this is the final goal of this sort of solutions: making teachers' lives easier to help focus on what matters the most, students and learning improvement.

So here's the list of 5 Edtech-Learning analytics-tools that will greatly optimize your workload and in the end, help students progress.

1. Yet analytics

Yet Analytics is in some sort one of the most complete Learning Record Store/ Data visualization tools on the market. Using xAPI to develop its platform, Yet provide a whole lot of different visual analytics to help you improve your learning content and help your students learn as well as possible.

• Yet provides insightful analytics on talent development, role readiness and career pathing


• It provides rich engagement analytics through different learning ecosystems


• It provides precise predictive analytics solutions

2. Wooclap

I previously introduced Wooclap in this post. The audience response system app is one of the best tool to improve in-class students' engagement. The Belgian startup proved they could greatly improve students' learning via their playful system of in-class quizzes app. All thanks to students' smartphones. The fact of the matter is that this app is also a Learning analytics tool. Why?

• They provide analytics to professors. Indeed, they can easily check who responded to what and how much time they took to answer.


• They provide a feedback wall so that students can communicate (during the course and after) to their professors and tell them what part of the course was difficult to understand, or which part was great etc. Thus, it's a great qualitative data provider.

3. Bright Bytes

• Their analytics tool lets you evaluate how teachers and students use technology for learning.


• It studies the availability of devices and Internet access throughout the school and at home.


• It measures the skill levels of teachers and students with multimedia.


• It evaluates the school culture, professional development, and technology needs across the organization.
  
  Part of 2018's learning analytics tools watchlist, BrightBytes is a great solution to match your needs with the tools you use.

4. Clever

Clever is one the US most growing startup in Edtech right now. Providing a single sign-on tool to students and teachers in order to navigate between all software and learning resources (among other products), Clever recently launched Goals.

First, Goals tool lets teachers set objectives for each of their students like activities to do, resources to use and so on. Then, it lets professors track the progress of their students with accuracy (students can follow their progress too).

Although data analytics with Clever don't go as far as Yet analytics, for example, it is still a very interesting solution to assist students in their learning process and to check their personal engagement with learning resources.

5. Knewton

Knewton is an impressive US startup providing a platform that aims at facilitating adaptive learning through data analysis.

By analyzing real-time performance data of students, Knewton Alta, its higher ed solution, helps professors adapt their courses to each of their students and track their progress. Knewton provides also its own verified online courses that will automatically adapt to students' progress.

Finally, Knewton provides a complete Learning analytics solution for enterprises, focusing on the best data and insights to help educators adapt and improve their content according to learners' needs. Knewton is already quite famous, but their continuous improvement is just fantastic.

More and more universities (ex: Yale, Columbia) in the US are dropping standardized tests as a requirement in students' applications, making them optional. The reason is those top US universities until today had very low acceptance rates while students complained about the costs of required standardized tests like ACT or SAT. The results were that although few students (fewer than 10% of applicants) were admitted into the universities of their choice, many others just spent money on being refused in the end. Without entering higher education, learners are thus already spitting money.

Nevertheless, there's a deeper problem to that. One test, or even a few tests, should absolutely not rule them all. As James G. Nondorf, UChicago's dean of admissions and financial aid told the Washington Post, "Testing is not the be-all and end-all". Indeed, when we think of these types of tests, one word comes out: scary. One test should not be able to determine the whole future of a learner.

The Problems of Standardized tests

Exam phobia is a real thing everywhere in the world. The thing is that scaring students is not the best way to help them prove they deserve to be admitted in the university of their choice, universities may miss the best students because of a simple test and that is unfortunate.

Making standardized tests optional and prioritizing more diversified tests, continuous assessments and skill tracking show that, according to universities, assessments are a key element in adaptive learning, something we just did not think of up until today (well at TestWe we did of course). More than performance, they focus on integrating assessments in the learning process.

e-Exams are an opportunity to better assess students

While standardized tests are made optional, asking ourselves how we could make exams less scary and more able to spot "golden brains" from every background is the right thing to do.

But pushing this idea further is also crucial. It's time to make exams more than just performance indicators. It's time to give exams the tools we need to better follow students, the way they learn and how we can better help them reach their goals. Better assessments benefit everyone and encourage active learning. And for this, e-Exams are the answer. By giving professors the way to facilitate their insights, by optimizing their time to improve their learning content (exam creation/ exam grading), e-Exams help them get what matters in assessments: how a student is doing and what could professors improve. Concerning standardized admission tests, e-Exams are also very useful and for certain reasons:

• Because they drastically reduce logistics, creation & grading time, e-Exams reduce the costs of assessment, reducing in the end students' spendings


• Grading automation or easy grading tools accelerate admission processes


• The secure environment provided by e-Exam solutions offer more flexibility to applicants that can stay at home while taking the assessments

So: the end of standardized tests?

Making standardized tests optional for more flexible, accurate and adapted tests that show more a student's skills is making more top education opened to students from many backgrounds and giving them equal chance to develop their thirst for knowledge and skills.

But wait! It doesn't mean we should stop standardized tests, it's more about rethinking them. Because, anyway, tests like ACT or SAT are "too big to fail". Nevertheless, there is definitely a need to lower their importance, lowering thus extreme stress rates from applicants.

Assessments are like a construction site. We understood the problems it represented and, right now, many interesting opportunities, like e-Exams, are popping up. We are slowly integrating tests into the learning process, making them less and less standardized, more and more adapted.

So is it the end of standardized tests? It's not the end, it's not even the beginning of the end. But perhaps the end of the beginning.

Learn more about learning optimization here.

Finally, hear what your mentor has to say. This one seems super easy but still is crucial. Mentors are here to help you get that accreditation. Plus, the school he or she comes from already is, so they know how to do it.

TestWe helps you optimize your learning processes!

Closing the loop means entering constant optimization and improvement of your learning processes. Whether you're applying for an accreditation like AACSB or if you're already accredited, TestWe helps you optimize learning.

First, because we offer a solution that let's collect, store, analyse and report one of the most precious data you need to benchmark your AoL and continuous improvement: academic data. Simply put, to get or renew easily your accreditation. That solution is e-Exam.

By digitizing your exam processes, we do not only save you time for your exam creation or exam grading. We do not only let your students take their exams on their own laptop or tablet in a secure way. We let you have access to their academic data reports through a data visualisation tool, facilitating thus analysis.

By inputting learning outcomes, learning goals and objectives as well as professors qualitative feedback on each of the students' assessments, we help you track their skills acquisition, thus facilitating learning processes improvement.

Want to know more? Sure, take a look at this white paper, you'll find other tips and testimonies from accredited schools.

In a previous article, we told you about our 10 apps and platforms we used to learn and among these was Youtube.

Youtube not only made a platform that lets people share videos from everywhere around the world on a particular topic, it also made knowledge totally, mind-blowingly exciting.

And there's a specific area that has been transformed and adapted to our new ways of behaving with learning. Essays. According to Collins Dictionary, an essay is a short piece of writing on one particular subject written by a student, writer or journalist.

As Meghan Daum said: "The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things."

Adapting essays to today's sauce and to Youtube, you find video essays. And these are not unsuccessful on the contrary.

As Christy Wampole tells in the New York Times: "It seems that, even in the proliferation of new forms of writing and communication before us, the essay has become a talisman of our times."

This is just true. Watching videos essays give you thrills, excitement and let you meditate on questions you want to elucidate. Watching them, in a way, shapes a path through which we never stop learning.

But why? Why do we learn so much from video essays? Well, video essays are essays. And both have the same benefits.

They aren't giving any concrete and absolute answers to a question so it changes a lot from the Manichean environment we usually live in and from dogmas imposed at schools.

They shape our critical mind by pushing ourselves on the quest for truth or for answers. We dig in many different sources that train us to filtrate the info we receive to fashion our way of thinking.

Finally, essays are great because they're "essais", authors try to meditate or solve questions and do not impose their way. It is a discussion that is launched between the author and the reader and we love, even more, millennials and younger ones, being integrated into projects and quests.

But how do video essays differ from classical ones? First, because they are video. And videos, you know that as we do, is a media format that is particularly adapted to our tool in our quest for knowledge, Internet. Stats are here: it is projected that in 2019, 80% of all web traffic will be claimed by video. What do you want? Videos excite us like a kid looking at Christmas presents?

En quoi les vidéos ajoutent un plus à l'essai écrit ? Bon déjà ce sont des vidéos. Un format très adapté à l'apprentissage et à notre utilisation d'Internet. Les stats sont là, il est prédit qu'en 2019 plus de 80% des contenus et traffics sur le web seront captés par la vidéo. Que voulez-vous ? Pour nous, regarder une vidéo c'est comme être un enfant découvrant ses cadeaux de Noël... Then, video essays are maybe more effective than written ones. As Digital marketing expert James McQuivey estimates that a single minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. Indeed, mastering visuals and sound create a whole environment around your arguments that help people understand more and focus more on the content of a video. And it is delightful!

Nerdwriter1, through his investigations of certain themes through movies, books, music or even political and mediatic events, delivers an argumentation punctuated with gorgeous visuals and music that rhythm his dialogue with us.

The essay here becomes a true art that makes us want to walk the same path. The eloquence and beauty of how arguments are put in place are very important to provoke curiosity from the reader/ viewer. Steven Fry said that "a true thing poorly expressed is a lie" and there it is quite matching.

The attention to details underlined in video essays make it a very much interesting way to diversify learning and deepen curiosity and engagement from students and teachers in specific subjects.

As Christy Wampole said, there is an "essayification" of everything. Mastering it seems more and more to be a factor of influence and traction, particularly through the Internet web. Notably, more and more online tools are making video and written essays easier to produce and communicate, like Medium, the famous platform that let people write and share stories.

Aren't you curious about how it will develop and how video essays (like the one we talked about but also the making of it) will be integrated into e-Learning or blended learning? We definitely are...