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- March 23, 2018 Reading time : 4 minutes6 steps to digitalise your tests
e-Assessments are among the top 7 trends of Edtech this 2018. More than simply digitizing assessments that you give to your students, more than making them pass the exams on their laptops, it is about improving learning and simplifying exam creation, grading. How does it improve learning? By offering the tools to the professors of your institution that will help them make better exams, more often and implement a better skill follow-up of their students. Then, add a learning analytics tool to an e-Exam solution, you’ll understand why some students have difficulties, why they succeed, if there’s a problem coming from course content, you’ll even predict which type of assessment is more adapted to the students. e-Assessments are key to the implementation of continuous improvement in universities, corporate universities, business schools, in fact, any kind of educational institution! Choosing e-Exam is right. But implementing an e-Exam solution can be difficult as previously said (lien vers précédent article). To be sure you’ll get it right, they’re 6 steps you must follow. 1. Everyone must know what an e-Exam is, even though they’re not testing it yet Communicate Changing your assessment processes is as crucial as being accredited. You need everyone to know what it is and what are the consequences. Don’t worry it’s not as complicated as an accreditation process. Nevertheless, it changes the way your institution works whether we talk about instructors, students or the administration. Plan Once everyone is aware of the coming changes, plan the adoption of the solution. How are you going to test the solution, who are going to test it? Process Map your processes. Assign roles to exam creation, grading, who’s going to proctor during exams, who’s going to analyze results? How will get feedback and from whom? 2. Don’t be scared by conservatism, it takes a little time to change habits Be sure of it, you’ll receive bad reviews from a certain number of people due to the change of habits or due to misunderstandings or simply because they don’t like it. It’s normal, it takes a little time before everyone an e-Exam solution. We calculated that after 3-5 tests/ exams, the large majority of an institution adopt the solution. In the case of schools (higher education), we found that the most conservative population would be a minority of professors having difficulties using digital tools. The reject expressed was, in fact, a consequence of a lack of formation. 3. If you can test it on a language course first… Language learning is the best kind, of course, you can run tests on, using e-Exam solutions. The obvious reasons are that: classes are generally smaller, which facilitates the adoption from students and the collection of their feedbacks students in language classes must take a lot of tests, from simple MCQs to writing and oral expression assessments you’ll thus have results fast and be sure you can go to next phase 4. Then on a Program, before implementing it to your whole school Implementing an e-Exam solution to a whole program is the next phase. Nevertheless, do not target a program because it’s “short”. Here you must test it on a program on which you can measure improvement from your students and professors. 5. Ask for support You can’t be alone, ask regularly support to the people who brought you the solution. They know the solution better than you do. And generally, it is notably for us, support, meetings and formations are included in the services. Use that help to better use and personalise the solution according to your needs. 6. Make sure you have constant feedback to benchmark the evolution Students and professors feedbacks are extremely precious in order to entertain a continuous improvement of your learning quality. How can you improve e-Exams, how can you better understand your students and professors needs without feedbacks? Must you change of digital provider? Must you focus on Learning Analytics? Try to get as much feedback as possible. If you follow these steps, first you’ll ensure a scalable improvement of the quality of your learning processes. Second, you’ll ensure that your students learn better. But hey! We’re here to help you too!
- February 21, 2018 Reading time : 5 minutesWhy roleplaying is great for learning?
At the WTO event in 2018, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said something that must be understood, “to compete with machines we cannot teach knowledge” as we find it everywhere now. By telling “we have to teach something human, unique, so that machines cannot catch up with us”, Jack Ma points at “soft skills” and “values” like creativity, empathy, art, critical thinking etc. As we were jumping on the tables when we watched this video, we found out that role-playing games were one of the tools that could be used to learn, at any age, these soft skills. Role-playing games? People understand role-playing games (RPGs) as being the good old Dungeons and Dragons to which friends played at, helped by heavy guides on how the environment works and which weapon can help you defeat this or that monster. It’s true, this super-successful game changed the entire generations. But RPGs can be more than fantasy stories based on guidelines. They can be more opened to … personalized stories. Forget about board games. What about role-playing games as stories you write from your own imagination? How does it work? First, you need to have a bit of imagination, writing skills and structures to think and write your story. Then you have to set up the rules of your game, of its world, some music, some illustrations of your story’s characters etc. Finally, you need people to take part in the story as characters. If you don’t have any that are motivated, go online. A move that can find its success. For example, the recent very promising TV Show The Expanse has been written as an online role-playing game, on an online forum … Several benefits are worth noting with writing role-playing stories. In terms of personal, collective, professional, and education improvement. Role-playing games are in fact really good methods to use in order to improve and learn better! We found three benefits. 1. Writing stories ignites your creativity Apart from playing the game, writing it is awesomely good for inspiration as you project yourself in a world. You train yourself to imagine it as clearly as possible. By that we mean its environment, the complexity of its characters and its socio-economic structure or the freedom of action players will be able to have once they enter your world. By structuring the mechanics, cultures and systems of the world, you go a step further and enter a continuous problem-solving phase. How can people travel across this world? What can players learn in this city or through this sub-adventure? How to build a twist? These are the kind of questions that will keep you, story creators, awake at night. It doesn’t stop there. Creating your own stories has influences on your day-to-day life. You become more open to new ideas and better organized at work or in your personal projects. 2. Setting up your world makes you better at storytelling The goal of role-playing games isn’t just writing a story. Nor is it to be read by people. It’s rather meant to be played by people. So you better train at developing strong storytelling skills. Players must adapt to their characters and be inspired by them. They must listen to your words to see themselves where you say they are. And it’s not just about words. The music you chose to frame a particular moment or the setting of the room the participants are in is so important to make your story become a collective journey of the mind into another world. Kind of like the movie Inception: a trip into a dream. Storytelling is so important in every way, every aspect of our society whether it is in career. We could give quotes ranging from David Ogilvy to ancient amerindian tribes that tells the importance of storytelling in our society. 3. Collective playing improves empathy and cooperation It certainly seems naive but it’s not. At TestWe, we personally tried several role-playing games. Although teams were a bit messy and uncoordinated at first, throughout the episodes we listened to each other and understood each other better and finally succeeded at solving the game’s problems. We had a great time together and it resulted in better cooperation between the team members of the family! Listening to each other is the first step toward empathy and ensuring a great cooperation between people. A quality that definitely needs to be mastered today to evolve professionally and personally. Overall, role-playing games are a great way to learn that should be used more for students Whether it is you writing the story or others playing it, role-playing games help you learn values, soft skills as Jack Ma called for a new form of education. It should be applied to course activities. How so? First, because it’s fun. Fun creates engagement and improves learning. Second, because you learn by living the adventure. By creating sociocultural environments in your story, by talking about economics, history, politics, physics, many topics that can be based on real facts, it can ignite curiosity and learning easier for your students. Third, because it’s a social game and as we wrote before about social activities was that they helped learn respect and understanding of others. But also critical thinking as we learn to articulate our thinking and our propositions to the group in order to make a step further into the adventure, we learn not to rush into a trap just because we’re tilted. A key element to develop for future leaders and innovators.
- January 10, 2018 Reading time : 4 minutesWhy do we learn so much from video essays?
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…
- October 23, 2017 Reading time : 2 minuteseSport unrolls its red carpet into Education
1.1 billion dollars, that’s what the eSport industry will represent next year. Understandable when you realize it attracts millions of fans around its exciting and engaging games and champions. From the epic adventures of World of Warcraft (Blizzard) to dynamic and strategic face-to-face team fights of League of Legends (Riot Games), it hasn’t been that difficult for these entertaining games to become worldwide watched fights into arenas where « wows » and cheers resonate in stadiums and where athletes display show incredible intellectual and team management skills. Without talking about gamers, eSport gathers today an audience of approximately 300 million people, nearly the size of the US population. Not bad for only a decade of existence. The game becomes now something else, an industry that includes marketing, management, innovation, media, betting. And now eSports unrolls its red carpet into the education world. Indeed, in the US for example, more and more universities create their own teams and academic programs concerning gaming but also marketing of eSport, management, communication, project management, game development etc. For example, the University of California at Irvine is the first public university that took the decision to welcome eSport in its education programs and decided to build a beautiful gaming hall for its students, thanks notably to donations from Riot Games and others. The results are obvious: universities that propose eSport programs like UCI rapidly see growth in terms of applications. The same case can be seen in China with schools like Hunan Sports Vocational College or in the UK with universities like Staffordshire. Introduction of eSport in education comes at a day when we can observe a trend of gamification and innovation into pedagogy. Effects are numerous. Strategic games like League of Legends or DOTA have real positive impacts on analytics, team management and organization skills. Gaming develops hand-eye coordination and constant activity of various parts of the brain making multitasking easy. eSport gamers also develop the same skills as traditional athletes. adoption of technology and gamification of education facilitates learning. In a way, eSport adds up to the Edtech family and offers a beautiful perspective to game lovers but also to students, professors, school administrations and entrepreneurs. It is interesting to see what impact games will have on education and higher education in the mid term and long term. How will it change our approach to education and learning? How grading methods will change according to the change in learning supports? Wait and see…