What is Crowdmark?
Crowdmark is an online collaborative grading and analytics platform that helps educators, working alone or in teams, to more effectively evaluate student work. The platform allows for easy distribution and collection of student work, offers tools for the assembly and management of grading teams, and provides an online workflow that streamlines grading and the delivery of rich feedback to students.
Workflow
Crowdmark currently offers two workflows for in-person and online assessments:
- The Administered assessment allows an instructor to create paper exams or tests that are written by students in a classroom or proctored setting and then scanned into Crowdmark for evaluation.
- The Assigned assessment empowers an instructor to deliver homework, assignments, and exams to students online with a due date. Depending on how an instructor has set up the questions, students can enter text responses and answer multiple choice questions directly in Crowdmark or they can answer questions on paper or using a word processing program. Files can be saved, scanned, or photographed using a mobile phone and uploaded to Crowdmark in PDF, JPG or PNG format.
Team management
Crowdmark has four user role types in a course: Instructor, Facilitator, Grader and Printer-Uploader. The user types have different permissions and access to data and tools inside a Crowdmark course.
- The Instructor has wide access to the course and all assessments, can invite others to join the team, can view student identity information, and can return the graded assessments to the students electronically.
- The Facilitator can create assessments and has full access to assessments they are a part of but cannot manage the students or team in the course.
- The Grader has access to grading interfaces in assessments they are a part of but cannot view student identity information
- The Printer-Uploader has restricted access to parts of the assessment used for downloading blank assessments and uploading scanned pages into Crowdmark.
See What is the difference between team member roles? for more information.
Grading
Grading on Crowdmark is intuitive and easy. Scanned images of student work are viewed by graders inside a web browser. The grader can make pen-like annotations on the pages using a mouse or a stylus, add comments including hyperlinks, embedded images, mathematical and chemical notations, and attach scores according to a grading scheme. The corpus of all the assessment pages can be navigated using the mouse or via keyboard shortcuts. After evaluation is complete, the graded assessments can be electronically returned to students with the click of a single button. Crowdmark provides tools for visualizing student performance and the data can be exported in a convenient format.