Imagine students as a group of athletes who run and prepare for the Olympics.
Beautiful, vigorous athletes. But there’s this thing, we don’t really understand why but their trainers give them these weird shoes to train. Ski shoes. They tell them to run faster than Usain Bolt with these. Quite hard to do right?
Well, this is the problem with Education today. Many things have changed and innovation changes the style of Education but students still have these ski shoes, represented by paper-based exams. And consequences are many.
Apart from being a hassle for professors in terms of logistics and academic data management (in this I mean getting all the data compiled and visualized in one place), assessments and grades have more concerning impacts on students and learning.
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!
