Return to travels is coming! Face to face activities of our Erasmus+ projects are back. Today the partners of #ASSESS project have met to plan the course for English teachers that will happen next September.
Teaching professionals and students may find assessment challenging, but the benefits it delivers may be a helpful motivator. There are obvious advantages when it comes to variable delivery methods, adding web links, documents, photographs, and videos and enriching test material.
With the shift of technology, education made its way to move into online evaluation, whether corporate certification or assessment of training efficiency, an awarding body that seeks to move off paper or expand to a new market that creates a scalable end-of-course assessment.
Ensuring the ability of students to learn is critical in every setting. Teachers and instructors can monitor each student’s progress and offer more resources and assistance when required. In addition, regular testing helps instructors detect specific students’ weaknesses in their academic areas and enhances their subject matter and delivery.
Faculty and students can take exams whenever and wherever they want via web-based exams. A time-saving benefit of online testing is that results are automatically calculated and immediately delivered to both teacher and student. In addition, instructors and teachers can analyze results in real-time. Online Exam Creator (OEC) aims to suggest a usable scale construction model for application or adaptation in assessing the exam-based writing exercises.
OEC has an easy-to-use rubric that can be used for A1 and A2 pupils learning English.
The criteria are divided into a different description
OEC provides time limitations, fast feedback, add media to questions, and precise marking.
OEC made an effort to make this marking scheme functional and comprehensive in evaluating the young learners’ writing performance objectively and satisfy the markers’ needs.
Online Exam Creator has several benefits. It is one of the best solutions for your organization to save time and streamline the learning process.
What Are the Advantages of Online Exam Testing?
Online language testing offers teachers an efficient way to deliver tests to students. Online testing has a number of tools such as videos, PDFs, podcasts, and teachers can use all these tools as part of their lesson plans when it comes to testing. By extending the lesson plan beyond traditional testing methods, educational authorities are able to include online testing resources and as a result, teachers are able to become more efficient educators, too.
Another advantage of online language testing is that it allows students to do the tests from any location of their choice. It also allows schools to reach out to a more extensive network of students, instead of being restricted by geographical boundaries. Additionally, some types of online tests can be recorded, archived, and shared for future reference. This allows students to access the testing material at a time of their comfort. Thus, online learning offers students the accessibility of time and place in education.
Since online tests can be taken from home or location of choice, there are fewer chances of students missing out on testing sessions.
Every student has a different learning behaviour pattern and a different learning style. Some students are visual learners, while some students prefer to learn through audio. Similarly, some students thrive in the classroom testing while other students are solo learners who get distracted by large groups so for them online testing is a blessing. This is why the online testing system, with its range of options and resources, can be personalized in many ways. It is the best way to create a perfect testing and learning environment suited to the needs of each student.
What Are the Disadvantages of Online Testing?
For many students, one of the biggest challenges of online testing is the struggle with focusing on the screen for long periods of time. As in online learning, there is also a greater chance for students to be distracted by social media or other sites. Therefore, it is imperative for the teachers to keep their online testing engaging and interactive to help students stay focused on the test.
Another key challenge of online testing is internet connectivity. While internet availability has grown enormously grown over the past few years, in smaller cities and towns, a consistent connection with decent speed is a problem. Without a consistent internet connection for students or teachers, there can be a lack of continuity in testing a learner. This is detrimental to the education process.
Without doubt students can learn a lot from being in the company of their peers. However, in online testing and in particular in language testing, there are minimal physical interactions between students and teachers. As a result, there is a sense of isolation for the students. In this situation, it is very important that the school allows for other forms of communication between the students, peers, and teachers. This may include online messages, emails and video conferencing that will allow for face-to-face interaction, thus reducing the sense of isolation.
Online testing requires teachers to have a basic understanding of using digital forms of learning. However, this is not the case always. Very often, teachers have a very basic understanding of technology. Sometimes, they don’t even have the necessary resources and tools to conducts online classes and design online tests. To combat this, it is important for schools to invest in training teachers with the latest technology updates so that they can facilitate teachers in online testing planning.
Many parents are nowadays concerned about the health hazards of having their children spend so much time staring at a screen. Spending so may hours in front of a screen is one of the biggest concerns and disadvantages of online testing and online learning in general. Sometimes, students can also develop bad posture and other physical problems due to staying hunched in front of a screen.
ASSESS Project
ASSESS Project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, as a Strategic Partnership for the Development of Innovation in School Education. It aims to define innovative methods and tools for the assessment of EFL learners. Its main goal is to bring new approaches to assessment and contribute to development of evaluation consciousness. It also wants to support restoration of assessment system and share good practices among European countries.
Progress of the Project’s Intellectual Outputs
Consortium partners have been working on the intellectual outputs of the project in the past months and have successfully completed the following deliverables:
Intellectual Output 1: Report on Curriculum
All partners created a database of stakeholders relevant for the implementation, and mapped the Curriculum in their respective countries, for the purpose of arriving at the Common Curriculum.
Intellectual Output 2: Database for Online Exam Online Creator
Each partner in the consortium created 50 Tests for 4 topics each i.e. 200 Tests and contributed to the database for Online Exam Creator leading to a database of 1200 tests.
Intellectual Output 3: Rating Scale
The Partner from Greece created a Handbook for Assessments by elaborating the process of constructing scales for Evaluation. The efforts have gone in simplifying the complex and multi-dimensional testing process.
Intellectual Output 4: Online Exam Creator
Currently, the consortium partner from Spain, Inercia Digital, is working on the Online Exam Creator.
Intellectual Output 5: Teachers’ Guidebook
In the coming months, after the completion of the Online Exam Creator, the consortium will proceed to the final intellectual output, the Teacher’s Guidebook.
The project ASSESS aims to define innovative methods and tools for the assessment of EFL learners and to bring new approaches to this procedure in European countries.
One of the major outputs of this project is the development of a practical Handbook for Evaluation and Assessment Methods for speaking and writing skills. The output’s aim is to help English teachers to improve their professional skills on preparing rating scales for their exams. The Handbook will be ready by the end of November.
Moreover, as we are adapting to a new reality due to the pandemic of Covid-19, remote learning is becoming a necessity due to closure of schools during lockdown periods. Digital technologies and distance teaching and learning have become popular educational tools and methods.
To facilitate the learning & teaching process during these unprecedented circumstances we decided to adapt and upload the materials prepared by the ASSESS partners on the LEΑRNING TOOLKIT: Action Synergy’s eLearning platform. More specifically, numerous exams/exercises (vocabulary, reading, writing, listening & speaking) prepared by the ASSESS partnership for A1 & A2 Level EFL Students are now available on https://actionelearning.eu. The chapters covered include: the weather, shopping, sports, my city/town. The students have the option to read the text or to listen to the audio before completing the exams/exercises that include “fill in the gaps”, “click & drag”, “true or false” open type answers, etc.
Last 30th of June we participated in the 4th online meeting of the project #ASSESS to talk about the completion of the first report of the project. We continue working and shaping our objective: the Online Exam Creator 📚💡👩🏽💻
Last 15th of June we had the third online meeting of the project #ASSESS.
It has the objective of innovating the evaluation of English as a Foreign Language. All the partners are finishing the Database for the Online Exam Creator wich will have a lot of A1 and A2 level exams.
What is ASSESS Project?
The project ASSESS is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, as a Strategic Partnership for the Development of Innovation in School Education. It aims to define innovative methods and tools for the assessment of EFL learners. Its main goal is to bring new approaches to assessment and contribute to development of evaluation consciousness. It also wants to support restoration of assessment system and share good practices among European countries.
With ASSESS, all the partners will have a chance to promote the specific skills acquisition and skills enhancement for foreign language teachers for:
1) effective teaching and evaluation methods of foreign languages in particular through the use of ICT
2) choice of quality products in language assessment, identifying the best meet the specific educational needs
3) use of products available either as an alternative or as an integration of traditional methodologies
4) creation from scratch of educational and training products that exploit the potential of new technologies
What are we going to develop?
Intellectual Output 1: Report on Curriculum,
Intellectual Output 2: Database for Online Exam Online Creator
Intellectual Output 3: Rating Scale
Intellectual Output 4: Online Exam Creator
Intellectual Output 5: Teachers’ Guidebook
