Toronto, Ontario, Canada (August 5, 2015) Crowdmark, Inc., the education technology company that created the world’s first online collaborative grading and analytics platform, today announced that Department of Mathematics at Northwestern University has selected Crowdmark to improve the assessment workflow in order to enhance student learning opportunities. The selection was preceded by a 12 month pilot program.
Crowdmark will be integrated with Canvas, the course management system currently used at Northwestern. The full implementation of Crowdmark will launch in September 2015.
Based on their experience in the pilot program instructors found Crowdmark to be effective in reducing grading time and providing efficiency to the workflow.
“We saw improvements in the consistency of grading and were able to return graded exams to students faster. With Crowdmark, we cut costs and improved the management of our graders. I also liked that the system helps prevent cheating and saves class time that would have been spent passing back papers to students,” said Dr. Martina Bode, Director of Calculus at Northwestern University.
Crowdmark is paving the way for a new approach to grading assessments by moving the traditional paper-based workflow online. This enables instructors to grade assessments in a web browser and for students to receive their results via email. It also offers opportunities for collaboration by facilitating the management of teams of graders.
“Institutions are actively seeking ways to improve the student experience and experiments at Northwestern have validated that Crowdmark improves the dialogue between students and instructors,” said James Colliander, CEO of Crowdmark.
About Crowdmark:
Crowdmark is an online grading and analytics platform that enables educators to evaluate assessments more effectively than ever before. The company was established by Professor James Colliander and graduate student Martin Muñoz, then in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, in response to the “logistical nightmare” of grading over 5,000 mathematics exams with a team of 100 graders. Crowdmark enables educators to grade a variety of assessment types, including handwritten assessments, securely in a web browser. The platform cuts grading time by more than 50% and assessments can be returned to students, with rich feedback, within hours. This significantly improves the student feedback loop and provides new insights into the learning experience through analytics.