Digital learning platforms are playing a bigger and bigger role in the educational industry. These clever pieces of educational software are beginning to account for an integral part of delivering the curriculum, both in traditional face to face classes and online courses.
One way in which digital learning platforms particularly excel is in the way they can help to manage assessments. This can make things a lot easier to manage for everyone, including course teachers, course administrators and the students themselves.
Why is assessment such a crucial part of the learning process?
Assessment has always been a very important part of the educational process. Whether offline or online assessments, this learning tool helps to consolidate learning and strengthen recall skills. It’s also very key for teachers to use assessments in order to monitor progress, weak spots and areas of excellence.
Many scholars on the subject of education actually believe that assessment is one of the main factors in student success:
‘Nothing we do to, or for our students is more important than our assessment of their work and the feedback we give them on it. The results of our assessment influence students for the rest of their lives…’
From 500 Tips on Assessment by Philip Race, Sally Brown and Brenda Smith.
As assessment is so important, it’s key for students to be able to have access to high quality assessment materials. This is true for all students, whether are studying with the help of digital learning platforms or not.
How do digital learning platforms make assessments easier to manage?
One of the biggest benefits of digital learning platforms is that they make assessments easier to manage. This is a key benefit for students, who may find online assessments easier to engage with. It’s also extremely helpful for teachers and administrators, as online assessments are far easier to manage logistically than traditional paper-based assessments.
It’s also very key to note that part of the value of online assessments is that much of the moderation and marking process can be automated. Automated assessments can save a great deal of time for teachers. Voluxion platforms, specialized in language courses, can also create your own tests and exams easily.
This time saving value is twofold:
- Firstly: with online assessments, the digital learning platform itself is able to automatically review and mark which answers were correct and which were incorrect. This can save teachers hours and hours of work in comparison to marking paper by hand, especially for larger classes.
- Secondly, automated assessments are also a big time saver as they can feed straight into the data and monitoring section of the digital learning platform. This means that instead of having to spend hours plotting and recording student marks, teachers can simply log into their monitoring dashboard and see all the information from the automated assessments already sorted and ready to use.
Are automated assessments still valuable to students?
Some critics might ask whether online and automated assessments are still as valuable to students. Our educational experts think the answer here is a very clear one: yes.
It was already stated above that many students find online assessments easier to engage with than traditional paper-based assessments. This is because now that much of the studying we do is computer or technology based, it can be jarring for students to have to approach assessments on paper.
Another key factor of this is that online assessments can more easily be adjusted for students of different educational levels, or students who need extra time or dispensations due to special educational needs. This differentiation process can be done intuitively by the software, which means that all students will receive a personalised experience.
Finally, one of the biggest advantages to students of automated assessments is that they can get instant feedback. In a traditional classroom setting, it’s normal for students to have to wait days or even weeks to find out how they did at assessment. When completing an online assessment using a digital learning platform, those same students would receive their marks as soon as they’d completed their test.
In addition to this, the digital learning platform would also be able to give them accurate data about areas where they had excelled and areas where more revision is needed. This means that students stand to gain a huge amount from online and automated assessments, as they can be an incredibly useful revision tool.
How can you get started with automated assessments?
Could your educational organisation benefit from investing in a digital learning platform that offers the benefit of automated assessments? If you’d like to talk through what you have to gain, and what digital educational software could offer you, please get in touch. We’ll be pleased to offer you our personalised recommendations with our compliments.
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