Creating Online Tests Has Never Been Easier
It’s easy to think of assessments as always indicating a learner’s true ability level, but this isn’t always the case. Some learners aren’t comfortable with technology, so any online exam will stress them out and potentially hinder their performance. Likewise, pen-and-paper exams can feel inaccessible to learners who are self-conscious about their handwriting or need a particular environment to work up to their full potential. Creating online tests that work for both groups can feel impossible, and some organizations don’t even try.
Whether students are learning in a Higher Ed, K12, Corporate, or Government setting, Echo360 and Echo360 believe that all learners deserve equity on assessments, whether they are taking a test on cellular respiration or professional compliance standards. In fact, equity is one of the three pillars of our e³ philosophy along with evidence and engagement. Our online test creator, EchoExam, facilitates equity by allowing instructors to quickly and easily create fair exams. Please continue reading for more information on how your organization can use our expertise to improve both test-making and test-taking.
How Can Software Make Creating Online Tests Easier?
Manually writing out all of the questions you want to ask your learners is a thing of the past. EchoExam includes a question bank with over 15,600 items aligned to common core standards and leading academic publishers, giving instructors the option of using existing questions instead of coming up with their own. If your organization needs custom content, EchoExam has an intuitive interface that allows instructors to create formative assessments, study guides, and practice tests in minutes. For example, you can use the built-in randomizer function to ensure that all test-takers have an equal opportunity to do well while discouraging plagiarism.
You can also choose from a variety of question types including short answers, multiple response, essays, multiple-choice, numeric response, and sentence completions to encourage learners to apply what they’ve learned in multiple ways. This is a great way to foster engagement when adding inline quizzes to videos on EchoPoll (our learning engagement platform) or encouraging learners to collaborate through interactive activities. Our Point Solutions suite of products enables students to take part in class via desktop, web, or by app. It’s just one more way we make learning equitable.
Our online test creator can also generate exams that can be administered online or on paper, allowing learners to choose the format that they feel most comfortable with. Your instructors can even generate up to 26 different versions of an exam at once for maximal convenience. Many competing systems lack this flexibility, forcing instructors to design and keep track of multiple formats that may or may not offer an equivalent difficulty level. Why guess when EchoExam makes it easy to know?
How Do I Get the Evidence I Need to Assist Struggling Learners Before It’s Too Late?
EchoExam includes all of the tracking tools you need to accurately measure learner performance, including progress over time and how one learner compares to their peers or colleagues. If you don’t want to wait until test day to discover how your learners are faring, Echo360 is a supplementary product that allows instructors to access real-time analytics such as test and engagement scores on the cloud, meaning that content is accessible at any time and on any internet-enabled device. Echo360 is also a great study tool for learners preparing to take an EchoExam test because it uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to caption video content, making it easier to search specific concepts for review.
Creating online tests might not be your favorite thing to do, but you can still generate fair exams with aplomb by taking advantage of everything that EchoExam has to offer. Contact us right now to learn more about how EchoExam and our other products can help your learners make the most of the opportunities available to them!