Did anyone read the Australian last weekend? Helen Trinca wrote an article exposing how KPMG Australia spent millions on online compliance training for their staff only to experience issues with cheating and mass answer-sharing resulting in a fine in excess of over half a million dollars.
In the classroom, facilitators are critical to the delivery of any course but I think we must be honest that even the best and most experienced facilitators can have off days and their delivery/support can vary, Importantly, though not every facilitator is the best and most experienced so the quality of delivery can vary greatly which is where the power of well designed online training lies: great course material, no way of gaming assessment, meaning excellent learning every time around for all students.
This article discusses how, with a properly designed Learning Management System (LMS), online training is valid and authentic every time.
Pedagogy is king: short videos and a system designed to stop students clicking their way through assessment
Quality online training resources can be extremely complicated and expensive to create but when done well they are consistent and can improve the learning experience of many students. Every student can be asked a different version of every question, something that is impossible with traditional training.
In the Australian article a managing director commented that "compliance training lends itself to a one size fits all model [...] so a 20 minute video signed off by a lawyer ticks this box" (Trinca 2021). This is despite the leading MIT research from over 8 years ago across data from 6.9 million videos finding that short videos were more engaging, preferably when a video was 6 minutes or shorter in time (Guo, Kim & Rubin 2014) .
Ammonite’s Validity and Authenticity Technology means a student cannot simply get through the learning through random clicking or mass answer sharing. The technology discourages learners guessing answers by taking them back a stage. This ensures the learning questions to fully engage the learner with the task by learning the content and answering the questions with confidence. There is a penalty system, so when the student gets a question wrong, they are taken back to a previous question and presented with a different variation to the questions they have already answered. Course designers with over 20 years of experience designing and delivering Vocational Education and Training assessments in this manner, worked in the development of Ammonite's penalty system to ensure it is a very effective deterrent to guessing.
This short video (2:04) provides a summary of Ammonite's Validity and Authenticity Technology.
Addressing online assessment issues with technology and design
Ammonite has applied the principles of assessment and competency based training in the design of its Learning Management System. The approach can allow the students to have an unlimited number of attempts at questions without reducing the validity.
We have created a short video (1:15) on how the design of Ammonite's Learning Management System (LMS) has incorporated competency based training alongside the principles of assessment to ensure learners to obtain the required skills, abilities and knowledge:
Summary
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Want to learn more?
Contact our friendly team for a demo of Ammonite's LMS to see how Ammonite can help your institution to ensure validity, fairness and reliability across online assessment.
References
Guo, P., Kim, J., Rubin, R. Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference March 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239
Trinca, H. (2021, September 18). Gaming online training a test for corporates. The Australian, AUSE01Z32MA - V1.