A little savoir faire

A little savoir faire

Published: Saturday, 13 October 2007

Do you remember studying a language at school? I certainly remember having to study French and being forced to attempt to take oral tests of my linguistic ability by lining up with other students and having to converse with my teacher at a time that suited her. That's pretty much the normal way oral tests are performed - there is always a bottleneck with many more students than teachers and a requirement to conduct the test at exactly the same time - with all the problems of keeping students who have completed the test away from those who are still waiting in line.

So I was interested to talk to Gavin Cooney, chief executive of Irish firm Learnosity, this week at the Assessment Tomorrow conference in Bangalore and learned that there is a completely new way that companies such as his can process oral tests that works far better for both student and teacher.

Learnosity uses a very innovative system that works using mobile phones and instant messaging (IM) tools such as Jabber. Kids can call a special number on the mobile phone and go through a security process to identify who they are before answering a series of questions, which are recorded and analysed. Similarly they can login to the IM system and chat on various topics, with moderators viewing the conversation and advising in real-time, to keep them in the target language. Though the system doesn't use biometric security at present, that kind of voice recognition technology is in the pipeline.

Students can then podcast their own response to how the test went so there is some immediate feedback from the student, followed by a rapid analysis of how they actually performed in the test. In Ireland, the system is used to test Irish language skills at school and students and teachers there report that the use of IT and mobile phone makes the whole process easier and with a far higher level of interaction - though in some cases Learnosity has found that the teachers need a bit of guidance on some of the technology! On an additional plus side for Learnosity, Gavin found that his own Irish has improved since he started delivering these tests for the Irish government.

Learnosity is running high-school exams in this way for several governments now in Ireland and other European countries and as I spoke to Gavin he was en route to Australia to work on a series of tests there. It's a nice time of year to be going down under.

In Australia they offer online testing for many more subjects than just languages and the New South Wales schools board has a very interactive web site that allows students to practice and test themselves in advance of the real exams. More than four million students have tried the practice tests on this web site and Learnosity found that the experience of building the practice environment allowed them to build an even more robust infrastructure for the live testing environment.

One of the amusing aspects of this is that Gavin's company can observe when and how students are practising for tests. It's obvious that most students cram for hours the day before an exam and relax through the weekends immediately prior to exams. We all know this, because we did it ourselves, but it's funny to see the hard data produced by the system.

This whole idea of outsourcing the assessment of students whether for languages or other subjects is certainly a growth area. Computer-based testing has moved a long way from the days of multiple choice tests and given the advantages of this style of testing such as reliability, equality, and transparency, most schools in Australia now prefer testing in this way.

Learnosity has clearly thought about the entire process of testing in great detail. They can cope with visually-impaired kids, physically-disabled kids, dyslexic kids, and even high-school kids who need to take a break from the test to breast-feed! Their environment is very impressive - Gavin claims that they designed it to work for "completely blind Linux lovers", the aim being that if they can get their system working perfectly for such demanding users then able-bodied Windows users are easy to please. The issue of inclusiveness is a serious one though. All kids need access to the exams and so it is not possible to build a system that only caters for 95 per cent of users - it has to work for everyone.

Education and assessment is an area of strong growth in outsourcing and the normal issues of quality delivery are of far greater importance than in regular BPO. When a firm is delivering exams to kids it is absolutely critical that the service works every time - to fail could not only cause a problem for the child taking the exam, but it would probably blow up into a political issue as irate parents call radio talk shows to berate the government for saving a few dollars with online exams. It goes to show that outsourcing could become a political issue in many more ways that just the argument of "vanishing jobs" alone.