Our Story
The idea for Crowdmark came as a solution to a real life problem. When faced with grading 5,000 exams by hand, each 14 pages long, for the 2011 Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge (COMC) University of Toronto Mathematics Professor James Colliander felt there had to be a better way.
As is typical in mathematics, the exam questions required hand-written answers. This meant that the exams had to be graded, all 70,000 pages, by skilled volunteers. Because of the complexity of some of the problems some volunteers could only grade certain questions; for example pages 1, 2, and 3 while others would grade pages 10, 11 and 12.
By matching human skills to pages, different teams graded on a page-by-page basis. This made the process and logistics of grading quite complex. There was a lot of paper shuffling. A lot! …and a lot of waiting around for various teams to finish their sections.
With the goal of solving this problem, one faced by educators everyday worldwide, Prof. Colliander partnered with one of his graduate students Martin Muñoz and founded Crowdmark. Together they built a software prototype for grading the 2012 Sun Life Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge. Working with the Canadian Mathematical Society, a partnership of eight universities, volunteers were able to grade the 2012 COMC in half the time by using Crowdmark compared to a year earlier.
With a proof-of-concept as a scalable solution achieved, Crowdmark as a company was born. Our platform has since been used by instructors from 36 countries in primary, secondary and tertiary education. As we continue to grow and build our community we invite you to become part of our story.
Cofounders James Colliander and Martin Muñoz
Our mission is to enrich the learning and teaching experience for students and educators by transforming assessment into a dialogue for improvement.
Our Core Values
Integrity
Integrity is intrinsic to everything we do. Our platform enables unbiased grading by keeping the student identity anonymous during the grading process. Academic integrity of assessments is improved by archiving a digital copy of student work that cannot be altered.
Collaboration
The education system, as developed over millennia, organizes a collaborative dialog between learners and teachers. Crowdmark values and improves this collaboration by building new communications channels among students and instructors designed to improve learning.
Community
Crowdmark values learning and views our community of collaborating educators as our greatest inspiration. We listen and improve with input from the people who are teaching and learning with our platform.
