Blog
- January 18, 2019 Reading time : 3 minutesWhy Pecha Kucha is great for learning
Starting this new series on new ways to evaluate students skills, I had the opportunity to talk with Dr Keith Pond, director at EOCCS, the online program accreditation from EFMD. Students are evaluated on skills that don’t match what most of the employers need,? says Keith Pond, ?and there are ways to change that, notably by changing the way we assess students.? ?I’m trying the Pecha Kucha method of presentation, did you hear about that?? 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.
- November 9, 2018 Reading time : 5 minutesAccreditation Management 2.0: tips from Dr. Keith Pond
Getting accredited is becoming an ever more important task to fulfil for schools who want to prove their quality on the international scene. That’s especially the case for business schools. 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. Keith Pond is Director at EOCCS and Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University. More than wise, Keith is a fount of knowledge who deeply believes in a change toward a more innovative Education. His stories and adventures with EOCCS are greatly inspiring for all academics and accreditation managers in search of improving their students’ learning.
- October 31, 2018 Reading time : 9 minutesHow does tomorrow’s teaching look like?
Dr. Palmer is Director of Online Learning at the University of Virginia. She sees an evolving role of faculty and then shifting organizational structures and processes to support those specific role requirements. She views some technology advances as tools to run towards and others to avoid. She sees a near future of faculty working collaborative across expertise areas to provide a high-quality student experience and the integration of edtech tools such as learning analytics and VR immersive environments in the classroom. Dr. Palmer believes colleges and universities will need to differentiate what experiences they are providing to students: creating new knowledge/research, preparing individuals for jobs, and/or building well-rounded global citizens. Education is changing fast and the consequences of this change can already be felt today. Boom! It’s quite cliché I know but still, it’s true and it’s also a punchy intro. Apart from AI making its way into professors lives, apart from Edtech tools making their way into professors, apart » OK! Apart from all that, the whole job of teaching whether we talk about primary, secondary or higher education will completely change. Due to technology development but also due to the change of generation of students to whom professors must adapt, as Karen Gross writes in Thrive Global. According to these transformations, what will change for teachers in Higher education » How will it change » What needs to be done » We asked Dr Kristin Palmer, Director of Online Programs at the University of Virginia (UVA). 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. The Western Governor University well understood that, according to Kristin Palmer, and openly state that they help their students find a job. « If you’re an adult learner and you’re looking for a job, I don’t see why you would go anywhere else than Western Governor » she affirms. What is going to change As it is more difficult today for a student to really stand out of the crowd to build himself a road to success, Palmer explains, they’ll have to be even more responsible throughout their academic path toward the market. This will have deep technological implications for teachers and schools who’ll have to rethink the way they grade, the way they teach and the way they engage students using technological tools. Finally, this technological and pedagogical change will then have even deeper impacts on schools organizational structures and the interactions between faculty. Moreover, the job of the teacher will become even more difficult as more and more elements will have to be considered in the scope of action of a teacher. As Kristin Palmer notes, « the main challenges are the evolving responsibilities of faculty (research, teaching, mentoring, advising, grant writing, presenting, writing, collaborating with peers, understanding Edtech, tech help, understanding pedagogy, staying on top of news/social media, etc) and the rising adjunct faculty workforce (and the lack of stability, benefits and a living wage for those adjuncts). » How it will change Talking with Kristin about students and their learning experience is quite moving. She loves them and shows it. « The University of Virginia is this place where » we have the coolest students on the planet. They’re just super awesome kids that are going to change things in so many different fantastic ways » says Palmer. But learning doesn’t stop there according to Palmer. « It’s not like you’re never going to go to the university again, that’s not the way the world works anymore, you have to constantly upskill and learning new things » she affirms. « It’s more going to be about a portfolio approach » she adds. Learners portfolios have to help them benchmark their learning situation in order to manage their professional path more easily and know what they’ll need to update in order to still be on top of the market. ePortfolios are a growing trend in Education, with several attempts commercialized already. We still need more intuitive solutions that would really simplify a life-long learning management platform. Teaching The same approach applies to educators. « There is a lot more demand on the future faculty members, » says Dr Palmer. They’ll have to provide effective ways to teach, assign and grade their students while continuing to mentor, research, write, attend conferences, be on top of social networks, know what is going on around. « Being a jack of all trades is not going to work, » she affirms. Schools and universities will have to make sure to hire people that have skills matching with their needs. And a portfolio approach is perfect in this case. Pedagogical methods have to change also. According to Kristin Palmer, students don’t learn the same way. We then must have to adapt to their personalities, which is nevertheless quite hard to process. An inspiring example from Palmer was on a History professor at Virginia Tech, the archrival of UVA. « He has
- September 21, 2018 Reading time : 4 minutesWhy e-assessment helps to focus on learning?
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! Download the white paper
- September 4, 2018 Reading time : 5 minutesAI vs Professors? What’s gonna happen?
Anthony Seldon is a British education expert that made the buzz in late 2017 by declaring that in 2027 teachers will be replaced by AI, offering a rich analysis explaining that it will, but it also should happen this way. The analysis was published in many, many, many influential media, like the World Economic Forum. This declaration is aggressive and if you don’t read the article until the end, you’ll that understand teachers are kind of doomed. Which is complete nonsense? Teachers will play a most important role for many years to come… AI threatens a great number of jobs, it’s true. Up to 800 million according to McKinsey’s study, although those “in-the-process-to-be lost jobs” means also a whole lot of new ones will be created. Yes, some jobs are really threatened and will have to deeply change as this analysis shows(like for example financial analysts, doctors, drivers etc.). Pedagogy is out of this spectrum as it consists of a human relationships activity based on social skills. As it is depicted in Sapiens, written by History professor Yuval Noah Harari, what makes us humans is our capacity to tell stories, construct realities, to develop intersubjectivity. The latter is the basis of education but just can’t be mastered by AI. AI are thousands of times behind what we can achieve, they are tools, not emotionally sensitive and empathetic persons. And I’m not even talking about the current stage of development of AI which is… well, we’re only at the beginning of it. Teachers not only will play a crucial role in tomorrow’s society, but their profession will be highly exciting. NEVERTHELESS! It doesn’t mean technology will not play a role in the development of this profession, on the contrary… AI will only help teachers focus on what matters If you go further into Seldon’s study, you will find some more interesting points. Notably, the development of AI as professors’ assistants. There lies what will 1. improve learning and 2. will make the profession of teaching more exciting than ever. Why? Teachers spend too much time on tasks that haven’t got a significant added value. Creating exams, marking them, managing the flow of documents and organising logistics during exam sessions currently isn’t really impactful in the learning process. These are unintegrated or unable-to-be-integrated tasks in the learning process, having thus little use for the core of the subject: pedagogy innovation. That’s where an AI assistant solves this problem. How? By clarifying situations through data collection and visualisation (also called Learning analytics solutions or Multimodal Learning analytics), thus helping teachers understand better how to guide their students through their work. By automating marking, thus letting teachers the pleasure to comment and to communicate with students on how to improve. By facilitating exam creation Finally, by helping them automate all the administrative tasks that take time. That’s notably what Rose Luckin, a professor at the University College London Knowledge Lab, affirmed in a 2017 study. Helping professors in their tasks and giving them more time to analyze and improve their learning content should be the main mission of AI in Education. Inevitably, it would also greatly help solving the shortage of professors worldwide and promote the profession as an exciting, entrepreneurial adventure with learning. AI will NEVER replace teachers In any case, digital can’t compete with human brains and human relationships, period. Interviewed by the media Futurism, Rose Luckin declared: “I do not believe that any robot can fulfil the wide range of tasks that a human teacher completes on a daily basis, nor do I believe that any robot will develop the vast repertoire of skills and abilities that a human teacher possesses”. Take these simple facts: Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University declared that “Human brain storage capacity is virtually unlimited and doesn’t get used up” George Dvorsky, a senior reporter at Gizmodo, a media specialized in new technologies, affirmed that brain’s memory capacity is a quadrillion, or 10, bytes. Astoundingly, this is about the same amount needed to store the entire internet! Terrence Sejnowski, Salk Institute professor declared “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” This recent discovery revolutionized the way we thought about human brains and it’s just the beginning. Apart from this, just like the McKinsey report stated, jobs implicating human skills are going to be the most demanding and the most needed. Yes, the job of professor will change deeply. No, AI will NEVER replace teachers, on the contrary, it will empower them!
- August 21, 2018 Reading time : 4 minutesTop learning content and blogs to follow
Summer is about relaxing, of course. It’s also a great moment to get inspired for Back-to-school and fill yourself with ideas you’ll use to innovate in your pedagogy. You know, be prepared to impress them like never before. For this purpose, we found for you some great learning content and blogs you should follow to get that most wanted inspiration. Some are directly related to Education some are not. We selected them because of their format, because of the content they offer and the ideas they share. Here we go! Nerdwriter 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.
- July 23, 2018 Reading time : 3 minutesTop 5 Learning analytics tools
Learning analytics is still in the air tonight. I previously delivered a report on Learning analytics and the infinite opportunities it offered to the world of Education. If you still have difficulty to understand what it is or how it works, I invite you to have a look at this document. It might help you! 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 BrightBytes provides a SaaS-based data analytics platform focusing on four basic frameworks that measure the effects of technology in a school. 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 organisation. 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.
- June 26, 2018The French National School of Administration (ENA) now uses TestWe!
From June 22nd to 25th, the French national school of administration (ENA) let their learners take their Law and Public Finance exams in order to prepare them for the classification tests. ENA is a prestigious French institution that prepares since 1945 their students to become top national administrators, in France and in other countries. The school thus decided to use TestWe in the context of a growing digitalisation of the French Education. Using the solution in this context is also taking the opportunity to modernise its evaluation methods and processes!
- June 22, 2018 Reading time : 3 minutesIs it the beginning of the end for standardized tests?
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 Learn more about e-Exams here. 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.
- May 22, 2018 Reading time : 5 minutesGet accredited without hassle
Accreditations like AACSB or EQUIS are the keys to access the club of the world’s most prestigious schools in Higher Education. No need to say these accreditations are expensive, exhaustive and require drastic transformations of a school’s processes and organization. Getting them, renewing them and entertain continuous improvement can be a real hassle. First thing first, it is important to understand what accreditations like AACSB clearly ask for: They want data-backed (quantitative & qualitative) decisions Rapid execution and testing Constant feedback A focus on how students learn A culture of innovation You probably know that the goal of getting accredited is to open a loop of continuous improvement that you’ll be able to close and continue to improve if the committees of the accreditation decide that you nailed it. What they want to you to do is to ensure them that students are learning well. That’s Assurance of Learning (AoL). As the process of accreditation is tough! AACSB is first about reading and understanding it Understanding the organization, its values and processes are not that hard. There’s a whole library of documents that just wait to be read. Nevertheless, it’s complicated to understand but it’s the best thing to do before applying to the accreditation. It is about integrating EVERYONE in the process Often, the complexity of the accreditation process pushes accreditation and school managers to isolate themselves in a high tower trying to sort out a way of getting things done. First and definitive mistake. AACSB, like other labels, is a matter of teamwork. Everyone must be on the same page, from the top management of the school to the students themselves. How? By forming the school management and the faculty to learning optimization By forming teachers and faculty to innovative solutions to give them autonomy By calling students to rally around the flag and motivating them to take initiatives, from entrepreneurship to student life projects Basically, it means telling everyone what’s going to happen and why it’s good. It is about managing a team! Calling everyone for participation is great. Organizing each group and process actions is even greater. The goal is thus to plan and attribute roles and problem-solving methods between all the actors. But hey! You’re not alone. Never forget it. Mentors and committees are here to help you carry this out thanks to their pragmatic experience. Organization and processes to adopt vary a lot according to schools and their cultures. Nevertheless, adopting an organization and processes based on constant communication and rapid execution between groups is crucial. For example, you can do: A first analysis of the state of the school according to the criteria, goals, given by AACSB (or another accreditation) and a benchmarking of all issues or things to improve. That’s opening the loop. Prioritize your goals and communicate them to the faculty and professors, assign them roles and goals per program. Communicate with your Data analytics department (if you have one or do it yourself) a data collection and analysis process (we’re talking about Learning Analytics). Decide which data you’ll record to follow the evolution towards the achievement of your goals. That’s the innovative management part of the loop. Professors must be formed with the platforms if they’re not already, you’ll use to follow data and feedback. They must organize their courses according to the goals you prioritized and communicate them to students in their syllabi, learning goals, learning objectives and learning outcomes and in any other ways possible. Let them be creative.- Their results will show up through data and feedback they get from students.– Then, do a regular follow-up to add qualitative feedback and ideas on how to improve your learning processes. That’s the pedagogic innovation part of the loop. Call for initiatives and projects from students to let them be active in continuous learning improvement. Remember, letting them engage and produce knowledge and innovation is ensuring they learn and are prepared for their present or future projects. Most importantly, by letting them do, you give impact to your school, you get access to more qualitative and quantitative data, you’re being innovative, you ensure your AoL.- Then, do regular follow-up to add qualitative feedbacks and ideas on how to improve your learning processes. That’s, again, the pedagogic innovation part of the loop. Process this organization and cleanly close the loop, you’re ready to be an accredited, top innovative institution! Get a learning optimization process Take a look at this process. Part Design thinking, part Growth hacking, we adapted it to learning processes. The goal is to quickly operate tests and changes following feedbacks from professors or students, thus you can easily accelerate your accreditation process and improvement cycles. 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