We love connecting with our incredible Crowdmark community, and this month we are highlighting one of our long-time champions at the University of Auckland, Andrew Eberhard. As instructors around the world prepare for a potential return to in-person learning in the Fall, Andrew’s experiences offer valuable perspective on creating a rich feedback environment.
Feedback as learning
Andrew is described by his peers as “one of our most engaging classroom teachers, and one of our most innovative teachers. His principal contribution has been in the development of new ways to engage and motivate students in large classes, taking advantage of technology to improve engagement and assessment practices.”
He uses a variety of feedback methods, including video messages and displaying students’ work on a large screen so that he can explain “what I’m looking at and where I think they could improve and I record that through my screen, pointing to different things.”
A leader in classroom innovation
Andrew has used Crowdmark’s Administered Assessments since 2016 as a way to deliver timely feedback for his students. When observing the impact for new instructors using Crowdmark, he saw that the platform enabled them to “do things a lot faster. They’ve seen the impact on the student side about how appreciative they are at getting their grades quickly and using the technology.”
Andrew adopts edtech that is easy for anyone to use, and he empowers his colleagues to do the same. To support instructors using new technology, Andrew designed, developed and implemented an Educational Technology Hub for the University of Auckland as a way to help share knowledge. When Crowdmark was first adopted, Andrew hosted and coordinated demonstrations of the platform. He found that once “people could see that [Crowdmark] was really easy and great to use it really spread by word of mouth rather than anything more formal”
We asked Andrew what he would say to instructors considering using Crowdmark for in-person assessments: “The key thing, I think, with adopting Crowdmark is just to give it a go. Sometimes a new tool seems intimidating but it’s just so easy, and straightforward.”