Did you ever have a teacher who would offer you partial credit, after a test, if you went back and re-did the questions you got wrong? I used to hate doing this, but it was an effective way of focusing on the stuff I didn’t yet really know. And it works in online education just as much as it did in your grade school classroom.
Local startup Smarterer has been aggressively growing its user base through a focus on skill assessment. But a series of product updates today suggest that the company isn’t content to just verify skills; they want to help you improve them, too.
This is from a blog post by CEO Jennifer Fremont-Smith:
Until now, Smarterer has focused primarily on helping you quantify your skills. Public profile pages, badges, and competitive leaderboards helped you show what you know. But time and again, we heard from the community that you want to use Smarterer in a more private way, to track your progress against your learning goals. You told us that you want to review questions and use Smarterer tests to improve your skills, not just to prove them. The new features include the ability to review questions after completing a quiz, continuous benchmarking to track skills over time within a new, private skills dashboard, and an improved test flow to minimize the number of questions it takes to verify a skill level.
The impetus for the change was two pieces of data. First, the average number of attempts for the Twitter skills test, for instance, is just over eight. Second, only 3 percent of users have shared a score externally. Taken together, this suggested to the team that users were looking to privately assess, learn, and re-assess rather than just acquire public facing badges.
My very first day at BostInno I wrote about Smarterer achieving 1250 percent growth in a week by tying their assessments to job requirements. It turned out that when employers required a skills test on an application, that drove users to the site. Ten million+ questions later, this news signifies a significantly expanded vision for the platform.
What I’m most curious about is how Smarterer’s expanded offering will fit with other online learning platforms like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, etc. In her post, Fremont-Smith writes:
With so many new learning options available (from EdX to Udemy to Skillshare), this becomes an essential tool for measuring the impact of different types of curriculum.
Some of these, like Khan, are already working on the assessment piece. But if Smarterer can be self-learners’ go-to place to check in after an open education session to see if they’re actually learning anything, that’s powerful.
