Online tests and online proctors

With online testing growing in use, the opportunities for cheating are similarly growing. So, why not use webcams & microphones on test-takers' computers to observe their behavior? I can see this feature becoming a standard in online tests. Read the full article here.

DFMv3 is live!

After 3 years of research and development, Dr. Flowers Test Prep and Logical Steps have launched the next iteration of our test prep platform helping students prepare for the MCAT online - DrFlowersMCAT.com

A big thanks for all of those that worked with us - advisers, students, teachers, parents, consultants, designers, programmers & project managers. Geeze, Lynn, wherever you are, thanks! ASU and SkySong, thanks for being the conduit for much of our premed research.

In this release, we've moved away from a strict individualization of student curriculum and more towards a guided journey to what you need to know. We now let students select which journey they'd like to pursue from Cram Session to Physics Booster. We've reworked thousands of concepts in math, chemistry, biology, physics, verbal reasoning and writing to be compatible mobile devices. We've moved everything to the cloud. We added a massive "question pool". We built support systems and trained resources to grade essays our client's essay according to AAMC's metrics.

The research told us so much. We gave cameras to premed students to photograph and tell their stories of preparing for the MCAT. From this we learned that students have busy and varied lives, and may study anywhere and anytime. We conducted surveys of premed students that revealed weaknesses in our competition. Second hand research and monitoring of what's working in mobile, social media, web 2.0, etc provided the reality check for the underlying platform.

We also learned that there's a lot of good content online. Yet finding it and tracking what you've learned vs what is covered on the MCAT is tedious. And fitting that into a busy schedule means the value of online test prep courses now is how to make efficient use of students' time.

It was amazing studying so many educational theories and trying to fit them together to deliver an effective & coherent experience. This meant we had to iteratively rework the application dozens of times and occasionally have heated debates about which theories should be applied when, where and how. As my friend Waseem once told me, "figuring out what to execute seems to take forever; execution is the easy part."

I learned that performance on standardized exams has more to do with applied knowledge than theoretical knowledge. I feel the same applies to building an elearning system. Now, let's see how we did applying our knowledge in DFMv3.

eLearning in Costa Rica

I just came across this enlightened presentation of elearning in Costa Rica. Warning it's 20 minutes.

It turns out that there's an alliance with Korean and Costa Rican governments in order to share knowledge of elearning between these countries.

From my research Costa Rica is a great area for elearning. Labor is reasonable on global levels. The infrastructure is good. The literacy rate is 96% which is the highest in the region. Additionally Costa Rica has a population of only 4.5 million with strong government policies on education. Combine these facts with open source solutions and some hard work and you've got elearning.

The only negative I personally see is that Costa Rica's local telephone company is a government monopoly. Thus telecommunications is not open to the best solution that competition delivers. But rather whatever the ICE delivers.

Insight into Reverse Discrimination through Standardized Tests in China

While reading about the ethnic tension that happened last week in Xinjiang China, I read an Associated Press article that stated the following.

A week before the Xinjiang riot, the hottest topic on the Internet — the most freewheeling public forum in China — was outrage over a top-scorer in the ultra-competitive college entrance exam.

The 17-year-old Han Chinese student's family falsely listed him as a minority, entitling him to 20 extra points and giving him a boost in landing places in top schools. The subterfuge, discovered by education officials, cut across notions of fairness in a society that for hundreds of years has seen standardized exams as a channel for merit-based advancement.

While riots and death are definitely horrible and newsworthy, the two paragraphs above caught my eye because, at Dr. Flowers Test Prep, we've reviewed research on how to address stereotype threat - the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies and which can affect performance - within standardized tests. In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he describes how our unconscious views, may be quite different from our stated views and that these unconscious biases may have in educational performance. At Dr. Flowers Test Prep, we've identified a couple of test preparation techniques involving scaffolding/fading and priming as being strong ways of addressing stereotype threat and the self-fulfilling prophecies that can result from this phenomenon.

Revenue Cycle University

I've been extremely busy lately, Logical Steps has been rolling out Revenue Cycle University with "go live" dates this summer. This is part of Logical Steps' latest joint venture with the amazing folks at Zimmerman. In this venture, In this venture, we've rolled out 20+ courses to a major health system in New York and are in the process of rolling out 10 new courses to 6 clients. Each course must be customized for the client, for a total of 60 courses, not to mention demo courses!

As part of this initiative, we're also building a super cool learning system. I dare not say elearning system because that term has lost its meaning to me with all of the varieties, standards and actual ways that people learn online. That said, our system is leveraging the best from our work with new media platform R&D including social media, animations, closed-loop feedback, healthcare specific asset libraries and many more exciting features.

Considering that we have teams in US, Singapore and India working on this, we're managing 3 different holiday schedules. Each course has dozens of tasks and combined with the system development tasks, our current project plan has almost 1800 tasks. Whew!