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Read our white paper — Rigorous Online Courses: Ontario Reach Ahead

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Reach Ahead opportunities in public secondary schools have many benefits. Students who earn a university credit during high school are more likely to finish university, and can complete their degree sooner, reducing the demand on the higher education system and reducing student indebtedness. In this white paper, Crowdmark presents an online course scenario with rigorous […]

Dr. Abdul Waheed Khan joins Crowdmark as an Advisor

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Dr. Abdul Waheed Khan, an internationally recognized leader in the application of information and communications technology for education and development, has joined the Crowdmark Board of Advisors. Dr. Khan will advise Crowdmark on strategy and on opportunity creation for students, instructors and institutions. With his vast experience leading technology-driven change in the global education system, […]

Introducing freeform annotations and keyboard shortcuts

teacher at chalkboard writing

We’ve added two new features to boost and enrich your grading experience, with efficiency and better student feeback in mind. Freeform annotations Feedback is no longer limited to text comments. Check, circle, and write on exams to provide your student with rich, contextual feedback. It’s easy to draw and delete annotations as you go—one click […]

Crowdmark expands team with three key hires

teacher at chalkboard writing

Crowdmark announces the hiring of three new employees to our team: Jamie Gilgen, Murray Marven and Sandra O’Reilly. Feedback from early users improved our online collaborative grading platform and allowed Crowdmark to recently graduate from beta deployment. Jamie, Murray, Sandra and the rest of the Crowdmark team are advancing our solution to the assessment bottleneck plaguing the global education […]

Crowdmark graduates from beta

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We are excited to announce that Crowdmark has moved out of beta today. Crowdmark helps educators, working alone or in teams, to evaluate and respond to student work better. Crowdmarking provides a cloud-based workflow that makes grading faster, more reliable, and easily referenced in communications among students and educators. Here are some of the features: […]

The incredibly high cost of grading

Reading glasses and pen placed on top of a stack of paper assessments

The annual global cost of grading student work exceeds $60 billion. I reviewed reports from UNESCO, OECD, the Gates Foundation, National Science Foundation and other sources to learn the following statistics. Global context Grading Salary The lower bound On average, each of the 28 million teachers and the majority of the 11 million graduate student teaching assistants spend 100 hours per […]

Crowdmark hires Lyssa Neel as Chief Operating Officer

Headshot of Lyssa Neel.

Crowdmark hires Lyssa Neel as Chief Operating Officer Dr. Lyssa Neel, formerly with MaRS Innovation, has been recruited to join the Crowdmark team as Chief Operating Officer. Since the launch of Crowdmark through the University of Toronto Early Stage Technology (UTEST) incubator, Dr. Neel has been the key business advisor to founders Dr. James Colliander […]

Crowdmark presents at LAUNCH

Crowdmark was demonstrated at the LAUNCH Education & Kids 2013 event in Mountain View, California. We thank Jason Calacanis and the Launch team for the opportunity. Here’s a video of the Crowdmark presentation:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9XM4fyY3z4

Crowdmark to save teacher marking time and government dollars

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Ed-tech start-up completes successful EQAO and Canadian Open Math Challenge pilots TORONTO, June 11, 2013 /CNW/ – Crowdmark Inc., a Canadian education technology start-up, is positioned to save cash-strapped Departments of Education millions by making massive-scale testing more efficient. Crowdmark has raised $600,000 in seed funding through the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program, MaRS Innovation and U […]

K-6 teacher testimonials validate Crowdmark

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In May, we ran a successful Crowdmark EQAO marking pilot at Golf Road Junior Public School. Joseph Romano, who led the pilot at the school, wrote that Crowdmark cut teachers’ marking time in half and provided a smooth, easy-to-use interface to facilitate both individual and group marking from home. Through the demo, we received additional feedback […]

Crowdmark completes successful EQAO demonstration

teacher at chalkboard writing

A teacher’s inside look at the Golf Road Junior Public School pilot The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO is a Crown agency of the government of Ontario that administers province-wide standardized tests to all public school students in grades 3, 6, 9 and 10. Crowdmark was recently used by groups of teachers at Golf Road Junior […]

Sneak peeks of the marking interface

student at desk studying for exams

The Crowdmark software development team is cranking away, building tools to help teachers grade better with our easy-to-use marking interface. The entire workflow is compatible with touch screen devices, and the marker history view allows markers to page back through their past work. Upcoming features include

The promise of Crowdmark

teacher at chalkboard writing

Fundamental institutional transformation rarely comes from within the institutions themselves. It is generally a result of extreme external pressure or disruptive technological innovation. This is perhaps most true of universities, which are inherently among the most conservative institutions in any society. American universities, especially public universities, are under greater pressure to change than at anytime […]

Independent schools and K-12

I was an independent school teacher. In my career, I’ve taught grades 7-12, English, Economics, Political Science, American Studies, and more. I was a house director, supervising up to 80 boys in the residence, coaching a sport every term, doing campus supervisory duty, even selling hot dogs every weekend with the boys to raise money […]

Idea to prototype

Inspiration The inspiration for Crowdmark was the logistical nightmare of grading the 2011 Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge (COMC). Imagine banker boxes and banker boxes, each containing FedEx envelopes containing tens of exams, with each exam containing 14 pages of hand-written answers to mathematics contest problems. We used skilled human volunteers to assess 70,000 pages of […]