During Fierce Education’s recent virtual event “Higher Education: Technologies and Strategies in the New Blended Learning World”, the panel session “Improving the Student Assessment Process” focused on the present and future of student assessment during online and hybrid learning situations while preserving academic integrity.
At the start of the session, Fierce Education’s Head of Content Elliot Markowitz polled participants asking about their experience on the most difficult part of assessing student knowledge in a blended learning environment during the pandemic.
The results revealed that for 39 percent, the most challenging during this period has been changing the curriculum mix to gain insight to what students are learning and retaining. For 34 percent of the poll participants, the most difficult has been implementing technology and processes to ensure that students are not cheating or copying answers when they are remote.
For the remaining 25 percent, creating fair testing procedures that take into account all the challenges students are facing in the current environment has been the major challenge.
Solving the assessment problem by using gamification
One of the panelists, Dr. Stefanie Boyer, Professor of Marketing at Bryant University and Co-Founder of RNMKRS, a virtual platform for training and assessing sales talent, took on the virtual stage to talk about the future of student assessment. She said that one important question to ask is: What do students want?
Topping the list of what they want is instant gratification. According to Dr. Boyer, students want feedback, and they want it now. “They constantly want to know how they’re doing, and they want the feedback to be personalized specifically to their performance. They don’t want generalized feedback. But they also want their feedback to be benchmarked. They want to know how they’re doing compared to other people in the class, and with other people who are also studying the same thing,” she said.
Students also want to be challenged and recognized for their hard work. “Recognition plays a role in motivation,” Dr. Boyer said. “They want to see how they improve and also want transparency.” Meanwhile, faculty want to see learning success. So, as it turns out, real-time measurement is something that could meet both students and faculty needs.
In order to achieve this, Bryant University created a free training program for colleges and universities. “It’s an application that students download on their phones giving them mobile access. We offer 24/7 student practice. It’s a self-directed program,” she explained.
“Students learn by watching videos and taking quizzes, but they apply their knowledge. There is an AI bot called Alex, who is a customer and will have conversations and role-playing situations. Alex gives feedback during the conversation he’s having with you about how things are going, and at the end of it, there’s written feedback on how the student performed as well as what the student should do to improve on areas based on the scores,” Dr. Boyer said.
Dr. Boyer showed the dashboard below to illustrate how the training and assessment application they created is helping with student assessment in an interactive, new, fun, and engaging way which delivers results.
According to Dr. Boyer, the students’ retention skyrocketed after using the application. “They remember and comprehend the materials, they can recall the processes and understand on a deeper level. You can see the scores (see above) when students are practicing, or when students compete.” Overall, the results are amazing, indeed.
Dr. Boyer proudly said that the current Top Role Player (below) was one of her students, with 350 role-plays in.
Other universities and colleges can also join the program by contacting Dr. Stephanie Boyer.
Disruptive technologies and interactive tools for pre and post evaluation
The second panelist, Dr. Scott McNabb, Professor, Department of Global Health, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health said that educational institutions were intentionally modeled on factories to standardize teaching and testing. “Technology may be changing but classrooms and teaching methods are pretty much unchanged for the past 100 years,” he said.
According to Dr. McNabb, the reality of education shows that most universities have offered online courses, but they have not disrupted anything.
In other words, education needs to change and adapt to the 21st century by embracing e-learning and adopting new, interactive tools to assure every individual learns at their own pace because, after all, each individual has different learning times and different ways of assimilating knowledge.
For Dr. McNabb, the drivers for e-learning include:
- Rise in demand for cost-effective training and learning techniques in corporate and academic sectors
- Shift toward flexible education solutions
- Increase effectiveness of animated learning
- Increased Internet penetration and surge in number of smartphones with mobile learning technology
- Micro-learning for specialized training
- Increase emphasis on online content development and blended learning
- Growing interest in flipped classrooms and adaptive learning
Dr. McNabb recommends the following innovative tools for pre and post evaluation:
- Flipgrid: A tool like Facebook or Canvas, and a good way for instructors to get to know and interact with their students
- Poll Everywhere: A quick way to run an evaluation of the learning captured by the participants
- Canvas AI: It possesses a very strong Artificial Intelligence that monitors the progress of students
This, and the other sessions part of Fierce Education’s virtual event, Higher Education: Technologies and Strategies in the New Blended Learning World, are available on demand here.
For other articles from the event, go to:
Universities Stepped Up Their Technology Game to Meet Pandemic Challenges
Multi-Modal Curriculum Vital to Learning Engagement