INDUSTRY
Education
Digitizing education for blended and immersive learning experiences
Highlights
- Digital transformation has significantly impacted the education industry globally. The shift has brought forth new opportunities and altered the roles of educators.
- Despite the rapid pace of digitalization, educators worldwide still deal with outdated syllabi, traditional evaluation methods, and paper-generation routines that are redundant and time-consuming.
- Location-independent grading enhances the grading experience by allowing more flexibility in the location and time in which graders perform their grading.
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The evolving education landscape
Across the globe, digital transformation has impacted the education industry, promising exciting times for all stakeholders involved.
This shift has opened new opportunities and changed the role of educators. Based on our interactions with educational institutions across the globe, we have observed that many educators are keen on finding ways to make their lectures engaging and are exploring digital solutions for teaching. According to the recent 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Assessment Platforms in Education, education has seen a noticeable increase in the adoption of digital assessment, suggested by the 2023 Gartner Chief Information Officer and Technology Executive Survey. This trend can be attributed to the growing digital maturity of education institutions and education’s response to the pandemic [1].
With major disruptions in the education sector accelerated by the pandemic, it is vital to rethink our education systems to ensure they adequately meet the needs of all stakeholders, including students, educators, and institutions. We also need to address prevalent issues such as teacher shortages, accessibility, and digital literacy, and ensure that educators have the necessary skills to cope with these changes.
We discuss one of the key problems that educators face in their day-to-day lives–grading and evaluation–using a real-world example of a popular United States-based university, and illustrate how the implementation of the location-independent grading model generated significant value for all stakeholders.
[1] Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Assessment Platforms in Education, 21 September 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Key responsibilities of educators
Technology has played a significant role in transforming the education landscape.
Despite the rapid pace of digitalization, educators across the globe are still dealing with age-old syllabi, traditional grading and evaluation methods, and effort-intensive paper generation routines that are loaded with redundancy and consume a lot of their time. While each university or examination body follows unique practices, when it comes to grading, a few patterns emerge.
Interactions with senior leaders and customers in the education industry reveal that almost every task an educator performs can be bucketed into one of the below six categories. Some of these duties, such as lesson planning, classroom management, and assessment, are about planning, whereas others are organizational and include operational chores.
- Planning, developing, and organizing instruction: Lesson planning is a crucial aspect of teaching that usually occurs several days before the lesson is delivered. Planning, developing, and organizing instructions are some of the most significant responsibilities of the job.
- Implementing assessment and grading: Assessment and grading are critical activities that frequently occur in the classroom, whether formative or summative. As educators develop a lesson, they must also include systems for measuring how well students have achieved their learning goals.
- Introducing new teaching methods: Research is an often overlooked yet critical teaching task that distinguishes good educators from great ones. Educators must determine the best teaching methods, including lesson delivery, accommodations, and modifications for differently-abled students, student work structures, and more.
- Managing the classroom: Many new educators find this area of teaching most intimidating. However, with robust tools and some practice, they can establish a practical classroom management policy that helps them assume control of their classrooms.
- Conducting research: An essential aspect of educators' daily responsibilities is cultivating a research mindset among their students. Most seasoned educators spend much time on research activities and related work.
- Completing paperwork: Most educators find paperwork the most bothersome aspect of their job. However, taking attendance, recording grades, making copies, and documenting student progress are all necessary tasks and part of the job description.
Why opt for location-independent grading
Location-independent grading leverages technology and an evaluator’s expertise to make the assessment process faster, more efficient, and independent of geographies.
Such a platform allows markers to perform video, audio, and paper-pen based answer book marking anytime, anywhere in the world. Integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics help prevent human errors and provide insights on marking trends to ensure standardization and consistency in the digital evaluation process.
There is a growing trend in the education segment where grading for assignments and assessments is outsourced. A closed group of institution administrators have explored how outsourcing grading tasks to an external entity can create value for their students, faculty members, and to the institution at large.
Having observed this space closely over the past few years, and from our experience in working with global educational institutions, we have observed that most of the educators face issues in the quality of grading and consider this process extremely time-consuming. They are also seeking a scalable and cost-effective alternative for this tedious task.
Clearly, there is a demand for a qualitative, timesaving, scalable, and cost-effective solution. A lack of adequate local evaluators has proved to be a bottleneck in the timely and accurate assessment of students. Location-independent grading as a service is changing the narrative for educators across the globe. By making the process location-independent, educational institutions can leverage a global pool of expertise and improve the scale and quality of their student evaluation process.
The key benefits of location-independent grading are:
Transforms traditional grading: Location-independent grading, as a concept, stems from the idea that there is a more effective approach to assessing student assignments. The digital marking system combines deep instructor expertise with the latest machine learning (ML) and AI to transform traditional grading, empowering educators to carry out the grading procedure efficiently. This approach dramatically reduces the effort and time associated with traditional grading, streamlining the grading process and creating a digital record of student work.
Streamlines the grading process: Gone are the logistical nightmares associated with transporting and returning stacks of paper, marathon grading parties, and lost in-class time. Educators stand to gain efficiencies that enable high-quality assessment from anywhere, anytime.
Mitigates unconscious bias: Location-independent grading helps keep biases at bay, by:
a. Allowing graders to focus exclusively on the content of an individual answer rather than the student’s overall submission or identity
b. Helping teams of graders to build, maintain, and apply an aligned grading standard for all students
The result is a fairer learning experience for students and greater consistency across graders.
Provides superior experience to graders: A location-independent assessment tool provides instructors with timely and effective feedback, allowing them to refine their teaching methods based on the rubric results. Rubrics refer to a scoring guide that assesses distinct components of an assignment. Through detailed feedback, students can better understand these components and improve themselves. Keyboard shortcuts can help to speed up the workflow, reducing grading time even further.
Facilitates meaningful feedback: In addition to quick and consistent feedback, dynamic rubrics ensure students receive detailed insight into how points were awarded or deducted. With a richer understanding of evaluation criteria and guidelines around concept mastery, instructors can direct students to the best resources for their individual needs.
Ensures consistency and standardization in grading: Answer groups and AI-assisted grading deliver a more methodical approach to reviewing student work, ensuring consistency and standardization in grading. This process helps eliminate redundancies, saves time, and produces higher quality and consistent feedback at scale.
Offers student feedback support: Once the assessment is complete, graders can immediately publish and notify students with a single click, either directly through email or exported to their institutions’ learning management system. Students can then review the feedback and manage confusion or disagreement by initiating a regrade request.
Supports existing touchstones, assignments, assessments: The breadth of compatible assignment types is wide-ranging – from paper-based exams, quizzes, and homework to online assignments, language assessments, programming assignments, and many more. Location-independent grading can accommodate assessment preferences for existing assignments without significantly adjusting the current methods. It supports a variety of disciplines, from humanities to the sciences, with a large pool of graders available for grading.
Highlights student learning: This method provides detailed performance data to pinpoint knowledge gaps. The analytics reveal which concepts were mastered and which were misunderstood. Graders can track progress and measure achievement of learning objectives through assignment statistics.
Helps refine instruction: The data can also suggest improvements to assessment and course content. With targeted visibility into students’ areas of strength and weakness, instructors can address potential roadblocks in real time and scaffold new concepts appropriately. It also surfaces insights that can guide long-term curricular improvements and refined lessons that ensure critical learning objectives are truly understood.
A case in point
A renowned higher education institution in the United States spent around $30 per hour on graders for grading touchstones.
The graders' productivity was three touchstones per hour, and they had a 72-hour service level agreement to complete the grading after the touchstone was assigned to them. (A service level agreement refers to the agreement between the educational institution and the grading service provider regarding the expected level of service). They piloted a few hundred pre-graded touchstones to assess the outsourcing metrics. The grading quality was on par with the institution's experienced graders, and they achieved a service level agreement of 48 hours, which increased efficiency by 33%. Moreover, the grading productivity increased by 25% (grade 4 touchstones) per hour, along with a 30% reduction in costs.
To further exemplify, an AI-assisted grading experiment was conducted in a selective independent school in England to provide a viable alternative to the formal General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. State-of-the-art ML models analyzed students' past performance to predict their grades. The study showed that teachers often took time to discover underperforming students, but the models displayed an enhanced capability to flag such students potentially. The results showed almost 75% accuracy compared to those in the General Certificate of Secondary Education context.
Reforming the grading process
Location-independent grading offers numerous benefits to all stakeholders involved in grading assignments or assessments.
Location-independent grading offers numerous benefits to all stakeholders involved in grading assignments or assessments. These include time savings, increased convenience, and reduced errors. By utilizing a pool of certified and experienced resources, location-independent grading ensures agility and security in the marking process and certainty in result publishing timelines without compromising grading quality.
Educational institutions undergoing digital transformation should benchmark their grading process to identify gaps and critical pain points. Service providers with industry and technology expertise can assist with this process. Institutions can start with a pilot stage or proof of concept by taking a sample of 100 documents to assess the system's functionality, privacy measures, and data masking. A successful pilot will guide future decisions regarding digitalizing the grading process.
Location-independent grading promotes consistency and standardization throughout the grading process. By transitioning from a paper-based to a cloud-based model, location-independent grading eliminates many logistical challenges, reducing overall grading time.
As flexibility and convenience become increasingly crucial in all industries, including education, location-independent grading offers more flexibility in the location and time in which graders can perform their grading, enhancing the grading experience.
