FORMATIVE
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Picking an EdTech venture to explore helped me realize something very quickly — there are so many of them out there…
My search began on AngelList, where something called Locogrid caught my eye:
2D metaverse platform for virtual campuses and virtual events. Locogrid lets users video call others by moving their avatars to be close to different groups of users they want to talk to and allows thousands of users to exist in the same map at the same time.
This is definitely an interesting idea in the face of “Zoom fatigue”, which has become very real with remote work and learning so prevalent in the past year.
At work, my team actually experimented with something similar in Kumospace, where video chats are made more immersive and realistic with avatars, maps, and spatial audio.
For some reason though, the Locogrid website was down when I first started tackling this assignment. I assumed the worst — that the startup no longer existed.
Note — Locogrid is alive! Here’s the link to their site.
And so my search continued.
ANOTHER AUDIENCE RESPONSE SYSTEM ???
Next, I stumbled on Formative.
I saw articles detailing how the company had just secured a $70M minority growth investment, which certainly sounded exciting…
Formative is a platform which helps instructors deliver real-time assessments. Students join on their own devices and answer questions — instructors can view responses right away.
You can watch their 47-second pitch here:
My takeaways:
- it’s a familiar interface — kind of reminds me of the Google Forms editor
- there are different question types
- you can convert existing documents — old and boring paper worksheets, perhaps
- instant feedback can be given to students
Of course, there’s no shortage of live audience response systems nowadays. Kahoot is the simple, colourful, and “fun” one that immediately comes to mind. Within education, I came across Socrative. Poll Everywhere seems to extend its target audience to workplaces and organizations as well.
How does one choose what to use then?
I work at UBC in an instructional support role, so I’m familiar with how larger institutions often act as gatekeepers in decisions surrounding learning technologies. There’s a bunch of factors which need to be considered — privacy, security, compatibility with existing systems, etc.
On the other hand, educators less constrained by bureaucracy and administration might have less guidance.
The good news is that many companies out there nowadays are generous enough to offer free versions of their products in hopes of reeling you in — Formative included.
So yours truly signed up for a free account on the Basic plan, and it only took a few minutes to throw together my first “Formative”.
Just like Kahoot, participants can join once they get a code. Instructors can also distribute a direct link to the activity as well.
I’ll let you decide how you want to do this:
- Guest Code — enter JCMPD6 at http://goformative.com/join
- Direct Link — https://goformative.com/formatives/60c6e12df6e8e5563f3f2cca
Looking forward to your responses — please don’t disappoint me on Q3…
THE PEOPLE
A day after signing up, I received 2 emails from Formative’s co-founder and CEO Craig Jones. I’m almost certain these were automated, but it was nice to see “Craig from Formative” in my inbox.
The first was a welcome message, and the second contained “exclusive links to 3,209 free lessons that are ready to use in Formative” in the second — subjects included Math, Social Studies, and Language Arts.
Craig describes himself as an educator and a coder — according to the Formative website, he used to be a middle school science teacher.
It looks like the Formative team is made up of almost 50 staff members, many with some sort of background in education themselves. After all, the company does claim to be “built by educators, for educators”.
Back in his teaching days, Craig set out to improve student performance by (1) delivering daily assessments and (2) giving them feedback faster. He had to rely on a combination of software and spreadsheets to make this happen.
In 2015, Formative was released — saving instructors from having to hack together a workflow like he had to do.
THE BUSINESS
I was sent a third email several days later — exciting news about how the company just secured a $70 million minority growth investment.
The article mentioned Summit Partners as the leading investor, a global firm with over $28 billion invested in “growth sectors”. Much of their portfolio seems to be in tech and healthcare — I counted 13 education companies as well.
I did some quick detective work to figure out the last education venture Summit Partners committed to before Formative. Just a few months ago in April, they contributed $68 million to Lingoda — self-proclaimed the “#1 trusted online language school”, available 24/7 with over 1400 native speakers teaching on the platform.
EdTech is all about leveraging technology to improve and redefine teaching and learning, and both companies are doing a good job of asking “why not”.
Why not make it easy to check student knowledge and progress?
Why not leverage global connectivity to facilitate language exchange?
THE PHILOSOPHY
When I search “formative” in Google, the first result is the Formative website. That’s good SEO right there…
I say this because “formative” is of course a word in itself:
Google also provides a summary of “formative assessment” via Wikipedia:
The goal of formative assessments is to generate better feedback loops between student and instructor.
Evaluating student knowledge more frequently can give instructors a clearer understanding of everyone’s progress, allowing them to be more responsive to student needs and struggles.
Formative assessments are often compared to summative assessments, which are typically delivered after teaching rather than during or throughout.
Think of a final exam or paper in a university course — these can be effective tools to test student knowledge, but they’re also often (1) heavily weighted and (2) not engaged in until most material has already been covered.
Is a course grade based solely on a midterm, a final exam, and some sort of participation metric always an effective indicator of student performance? Probably not, but this isn’t uncommon either — it’s definitely less work for instructors if you’re in a cynical mood…
While I wouldn’t give it too many points for creativity, Formative is really named exactly after what it’s trying to facilitate.
Instructors can quickly create assessments filled with a variety of question types — content such as documents, images, and videos can be incorporated throughout as well.
Student submissions are visible right away, and instructors can easily:
- Look at an overview of how their students did on the entire assessment
2 — Drill down into how students did on a particular question
3 — Drill down into an individual student’s performance
There’s actually a Research page on Formative’s website which summarizes a couple of studies conducted on the platform.
One by the American Institute of Research suggested that:
I have no doubt that these were highlighted to show the platform’s were ease of use, effectiveness, and impact. This a product after all…
Another study focused on the student perspective, and it looks like they felt positively about Formative too — this focus group, at least.
ARE WE IMPRESSED ???
Earlier, I mentioned Kahoot, Socrative, and Poll Everywhere.
These are just examples of platforms similar to Formative, and I’m sure there are plenty more out there.
What sets Formative apart? That’s a tough question to answer, and really shouldn’t be addressed without detailed testing. Obviously, each educator and institution will have different needs as well.
In this case, we might as well look at what makes Formative a formidable (haha) option for educators then.
Again, the Basic plan is free for use — both sign up and setup are super quick.
Formative also offers paid plans for those who need more functionality — Premium has more features, Small Team focuses on reports and internal collaboration, while School / District is probably more appropriate for large-scale implementations.
The Formative Library is a repository of instructor-created content — users can filter by grade, subject, or even authour.
At the very least, this public material can serve as inspiration for others on the platform. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there are teachers out there who will just grab an existing quiz and assign that to their students.
Formative is updated each month.
For me, this reflects (1) a diligent developer team and (2) an openness to change and improvement at the company.
Instructors are the power users, which means that they will often be the first ones to notice bugs or point out gaps in functionality. At my work, we’re always hearing new complaints about Canvas.
Each product update page ends with this following piece of text:
Most of these changes were inspired by teacher requests. You, too, can make a mark on the evolution of Formative! Head to our Formative Feedback page where you can submit a new idea or vote on existing suggestions!
Indeed, there are a whole bunch of suggestions — and discussion threads revolving around them — on the Formative feedback page. At first glance, the community looks solid.
There’s even a Roadmap tab. While it does look a little sparse at the moment, maybe only one new feature gets worked on at a time?
I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s in store for July…
