YouTestMe - Classroom2020
Introduction
The main goal of YouTestMe Classroom 2020 is to catch the wave of modernizing the process of knowledge assessment and learning by allowing the users to focus on important things and automating the tedious processes. Remember your days at school? Acquiring real, practical knowledge has never been an easy process. We aspire to provide the users a simple way to learn more comfortably and motivate them to use their mindsets as often as possible.
Imagine the system where teachers will have immediate feedback about their lectures, where all students are equally engaged in the learning process, where school officials will have a consolidated view of the education process and progress, where parents will not ask their kids "What did you learn in school today?" because they will already know it.
However, Classroom 2020 does not focus solely on schools and universities. Since it is highly customizable, it can be tailored to suit the needs of different profiles and institutions. Every business and institution that needs training and evaluation can find this software useful in those areas, because its elements are made to suit all types of data.
Classroom 2020 is software used in the learning process to practice lectured subjects through customized tasks and projects, uniquely designed for each individual. While the participants are interacting with the system, a wealth of information is collected and then turned into information (reports, graphs and charts) that can be used to quickly adjust the process of adopting knowledge. Each student is different and the system aspires to adapt to them. This is performed by archiving various scores and statistics, and the system consequently “learns” and tailors follow-up subjects and tests according to their capabilities. On examination, these reports can provide invaluable data to teachers, school officials and the government, so adjusting the knowledge assessment program according to the previous is what should be the key point in improving the entire process. The Classroom 2020 software makes this cycle as fast and efficient as possible.
Note: Classroom 2020 inherits all of YouTestMe - Starter features, updating them and adding new ones for an even more refined testing process. The interface has also been significantly remodeled for better user experience and a more clear working environment.
Premises
- Students learn best when they work and solve problems independently.
- The goal is not just to score well on tests, but to gain permanent and practical knowledge.
- Teachers cannot dedicate full attention to every student during the class.
- Teaching and learning would be significantly more efficient and useful if technology was introduced in the process.
- Technology is inevitably seeping into classrooms and the education process.
Using Classroom 2020 in Teaching and Learning Processes
The following scenario is given to illustrate one possible usage of the YouTestMe system in the learning process:
1. Consider a class of 25 students and each of them has a device with an Internet browser.
2. The class is set up in the YouTestMe system with students’ names and contact information such as email or a messaging ID.
3. The 45 minute lesson has a goal to teach the volume calculation of the sphere and the cylinder.
4. The teacher will provide a lecture on how to calculate the volumes and then they will use the YouTestMe system to assign a customized task to each student. On teacher's demand, system will send a task link to each of the students in the class. Every student will receive different input parameters for their task.
5. Students will calculate results and enter them into the system. The system will let them know immediately if they calculated the results correctly. If they didn't, they will be given another chance to answer.
6. In case students need help, they are able to request additional information from the system. This additional information will be a part of the lecture designed for this purpose.
Features
Personal Profile
Each user has a profile page containing personal details, their role in the system, the courses and classes they are a member of, the question pools they can use and the test collection. User passwords may be changed through this window, either manually, or a generated one can be sent by email. A list of subscribers – the persons who receive regular reports concerning the respective users can also be viewed here.
Profiles
This part of the application contains several modules. The first and perhaps most important is a table that contains all users in the system. This table’s columns can be filtered, ordered and searched for easier manipulation and organization.
The second thing is the role system – each user is granted a role that defines their access to certain parts of the application. Those users that have a higher level of permissions can create new roles and assign them to users. Excel spreadsheets can also be used to import users into the application. Through this part of the application, people with higher level of permissions can handle the register requests for new users. Finally, subscriber groups can be viewed and handled through this page.
Courses and Classes
Quiz participants are organized into courses and classes. The characteristics defining a course are its name, ID number, code, duration, status, creation date and author. Each of these characteristics can be changed by the course manager(s) if necessary. Courses can also be either active or inactive, depending on the duration. Each course is unique and there cannot be two courses of the same name. Users can be assigned directly into a course or into a class. Courses are organized hierarchically, which means that a single course can have numerous sub-courses, but only one parent course.
Classes, on the other hand, cannot be organized hierarchically directly, but may be attached to courses. They serve as a means to organize participants in a more detailed manner and can be very useful with certain specific situations such as multi-lingual groups.
After each test, the system records each user’s results, meaning that the future content will be tailored according to their performance. In this manner, the course participants will be easily distinguished and appropriately awarded one of these three user levels:
- Basic – the users with the lowest performance rates receive this level.
- Intermediate – this level expresses a medium user performance.
- Advanced – users awarded with this level rank among the top performers in tests.
The system assigns different questions and/or offered answers according to one of the user levels above. This feature is entirely optional and may be turned off in case of standardized testing situations where all users need to have similar tests.
Lesson
The goal behind the lesson module is to save as much time as possible and enable professors to focus on each student individually, because each student has a specific mindset and their own preferences in the education process. Each lesson is consisted out of lesson items which represent any combination of the following elements: description, literature and quiz.
It is important to mention that every lesson author may hide or restrict access to each lesson item, completely independently – which means that every item is an entity on its own. They are also able to change the item order within a lesson. The system’s homepage also contains the most recent changes in lessons, so that the users may be up to date immediately.
Literature represents an embedded or a downloadable file that is used to pass the knowledge to students. Various formats are supported – YouTube and various videos, Google docs, pictures, sounds/music, Microsoft Office documents and much more. Almost anything that can be uploaded is supported within the application.
A lesson discussion board and more personal interaction between users are added as well, so even students who are not present can participate in lessons and quizzes equally. The users are able to comment the published lessons and rate each other’s comments.
Quizzes and Reports
The main feature of YouTestMe Classroom 2020 is certainly the Quiz. We have implemented a powerful Quiz Generator whose main purpose is to drastically reduce the amount of time spent creating tests and evaluating. It is very simple to use, since it is only needed to enter certain quiz parameters, assign members and choose a grading system. Here are the parameters that need to be entered:
1. Quiz name
2. Quiz type
3. Access
4. Quiz duration type and duration (if the quiz is timed)
5. Quiz category
6. Report type and content
7. Quiz look type
Optionally, a quiz description can be entered and the option to randomize the question and answer order.
After typing in these parameters, the creator proceeds to the next step where they need to enter question pool resources for that quiz, set the quiz availability, optionally define the frequency factor and set a cut-off date. The only pools that can be chosen are those where the quiz creator is a member. Entering individual questions is also possible and this way quiz managers can add questions to both the quiz and a pool. Quiz availability represents the time period that the quiz will be available for taking. Frequency factor is an optional feature that represents several frequency attributes that can be attached to each question: Never, Rarely, Medium, Often and Always. Each of these attributes represents a percentage of how likely is the question to appear in the quiz. Another optional feature is a cut-off date. This feature serves to avoid the repetition of questions in consecutive quizzes. After setting all these parameters, they can be reviewed in a table.
Next step involves the specification of the number of points awarded for a correct answer as well as a penalty for an incorrect one. It is possible to review certain parameters such as: total number of questions, maximum number of points that can be achieved, the quiz duration, etc.
Final step in the quiz making process lets the quiz creator review their parameters, go back to change them if necessary and save the quiz as a template. The only thing left to do is choose a grading system and the members. Now the quiz is ready to be distributed. It is important to mention that it is possible to save these parameters as a template, in order to be used later when making additional quizzes. Public templates, made available by other creators, can be used as well. This feature shortens the quiz creation process even more. Quiz status is also an important characteristic. Depending on the availability, quizzes can be: Not scheduled, Scheduled, Expired, Suspended and Deleted.
Quiz templates represent a new way of reusing quizzes. By using a template, the quiz generator is able to create quizzes with the different questions, by using the same predefined parameters. In case the resource is spacious and by setting the correct cut-off date, it is possible to use one template numerous times, and receive different results every time. This way, the quiz creation process is reduced even further.
Besides using the Quiz Generator to create new quizzes, it is possible to handpick the questions from pools that the user wishes to appear. This way, every participant will receive the same quiz version - there are no unique tests involved. In addition to that, some parameters such as the frequency factor and the cut-off date, used during the generation process, also become obsolete, and do not need to be defined. Manually created quizzes can be copied for repetitive usage.
The Quizzes page contains three subpages – Look, Tree and New Quiz. The New Quiz option has already been covered in the Quizzes section of this document, so now we will provide insight into the other two. Quizzes – Quick Look, as the name states, provides an overview of quizzes that logged user received and links to their reports. They are sorted by status: Active, Scheduled and Finished. The quiz templates the current user has access to can also be viewed here.
Quizzes – Tree represents all quizzes the user created, sorted by their category – they can jump straight to the quiz’s individual page and distribute it to users or change parameters at will.
Reports
One of the most important aspects of every test is the manner in which the reports are distributed and archived. The system has a very extensive reporting system that tracks various statistics. First, the quiz creator(s) choose what type of report will be shown to participants, a full one – containing a grade and the preview answers, or a partial one – containing a grade only. Next, when the quiz is distributed, in the Reports panel, these statistics are shown:
- The total number of participants and the number of participants who haven’t participated in the quiz yet.
- A pie chart containing the grade breakdown of the quiz (so far).
- Question occurrence – shows which question was the most frequent in the unique tests.
- Success ratio – this statistic represents the percentage of students that made correct answers in case the question awards a fixed number of points and in case there is a point range, it represents a percentage of participants who had more than 0 points compared to all participants. Each question has its own success ratio.
- Participants’ statistics – quiz managers can view each participant’s individual questions, to see if they answered correctly.
- Average duration – if the quiz is timed per question, it will show how much time the participants needed to answer on that question, in average. If the duration is per entire quiz – this statistic shows the average time participants needed to complete the quiz.
- Questions within the quiz and the unique tests.
- Quiz parameters.
Additional collected information is sorted into graphs and charts. New charts specifically for comparison between various statistics (i.e. average individual performance to average class performance for Geography course) can be utilized between several available parameters.
All of the archived reports can be shared with targeted third parties, if necessary. For example:
- Government – to track the progress;
- Companies – to search for the most suitable profiles;
- External institutions – to search for the most suitable profiles;
- Other departments (HR, Communications...).
Questions, Complex Problem Processor, Answer Generator
The objects that contain questions are called Question Pools. They can hold a theoretically infinite number of questions. Access to the Pools is entirely personal, but the creator(s) can make it publicly available. Every user can make their personal Question Pools. The pool creator(s) can select which members can use the pool. It is also possible to import questions into pools by using the application’s Excel template.
The questions in the application are sorted by difficulty: Easy, Medium and Hard. Besides this, questions can be differentiated according to their type:
1. Single choice – Quiz participants can choose one of the offered answers and only one is correct.
2. Multiple choice – More than one of the offered answers may be correct.
3. Ordering – Place the offered answers into correct order.
4. Matching – The participants need to match the answers from the left side to the ones on the right.
5. True or False – The participants need to review if the given statement is true or false.
6. Fill in the blanks – Blank spaces are left for participants to enter their answers in. Usually involves completing sentences.
7. Essay – Requires the user to type in a free form of text on the given theme.
First five question types can be graded automatically, while the last two require a quiz manager to grade them. Also, by using the built-in question editor it is possible to customize questions in various ways. For example, essay questions can be used to present mathematical functions and expressions or pictures and HTML content. The main goal of the editor is to support creativity.
Complex Problem Processor
The complex problem processor represents an advanced module for solving problems and questions by involving programming into creating unique questions with variable parameters. This is best described through an example: Imagine a following situation, a professor is teaching a lecture on cylinder volume. After the lecture, a test is distributed to test the knowledge attained on that class. The professor uses the Complex Problem Processor to search for a formula of calculating cylinder volume, adds a range of minimum and maximum values of the radius and height (1 to 4 inches) and the step between the values (0.1). Each student in the class will get different values for calculating, thus implying they need to use their minds to solve the problem.
These kinds of formulas are held within Java Archives (.jar) or pulled from external APIs. The benefits are numerous:
- Prevents copying answers;
- Makes students use their minds;
- Saves time;
- Enables peer grading by involving coding.
With complex problem processor you can enable students to practice programming by creating unique questions for their peers. For example, eighth graders can create questions that will be used for sixth graders, etc. Consult the complex problem processor user manual.
Answer Generator
When creating a question, the users can open “Advanced Options”, where they can enter the number of answers and the number of correct answer(s) to be shown to students. Only some of the answers entered in the generator will be provided within the offered answers for that question (the creator can choose to show all answers if needed). According to their user level, advanced participants will get a more difficult combination of the answers offered (more incorrect answers, more “distractors”, etc.). The Answer generator only applies to single/multiple choice question types.