It’s been a busy quarter for UTEST company TrendMD. Fresh off their participation in Ycombinator’s Winter 2016 cohort, which was covered in TechCrunch, the company has announced partnerships with HighWire…
TORONTO, Oct. 21, 2015 – Working with five leading universities in North America during 2014-15, Crowdmark Inc., a collaborative online grading and analytics platform, has demonstrated the benefits and advantages of using two-stage examinations in a number of undergraduate programs in post-secondary institutions across the world.
Crowdmark has worked with universities to introduce two-stage exams as a way to integrate collaborative learning and assessment into the traditional exam format. In a two-stage exam, students individually complete the exam and then, working in groups of three to four, immediately complete the exam again. This method provides students with immediate feedback through discussion with their peers as they deliberate the most correct response. The two-stage exam provides feedback on individual performance while increasing students’ engagement and comprehension of course content.
James Colliander, Crowdmark Founder/CEO and Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia is encouraged by the reception two-stage exams have received at universities in North America.
“The experiments with two-stage exams last spring were very informative and helped shape our platform to support a new and emerging assessment scenario,” says Colliander. “Also with feedback from our customers, we made elegant improvements allowing Crowdmark to be used for other assessment types including lab reports and group projects.”
Shotlst is one of six inaugural UTEST companies; next UTEST application round to begin shortly
What if you could turn on Microsoft Word’s “track changes” tool and apply it at will to the world around you?
Sound like science fiction?
Meet Matt Ratto, a professor in the University of T’s Faculty of Information, and Mike Borg, a recent graduate of the faculty. They’ve formed Shotlst, a new software company being incubated by the University of Toronto Early Stage Technology (UTEST) program.
The central metaphor of Shotlst is the “shot list,” a list of scenes a film director plans to get each day on a movie set. It serves to organize the cast and crew’s time and activity for the day.
With Shotlst, a user decides at the outset on “shots” that will be consistent throughout the life of a project.
For example, an architect might take pictures of a cardboard model of a building, 3-D renderings and, later, the actual construction site. These shots would serve as raw material that colleagues could use to annotate and collaborate using the software.
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