Pivoting to support children and schools
Everyone’s had to pivot as the country’s faced the pandemic over the last several months. Maybe you’ve carved out a corner at the kitchen table to become your new office, hoping your colleagues don’t notice the open milk carton on the counter behind you. Maybe you’ve gotten creative with your home workout since your gym is closed and weekly basketball games with your neighbors are ill-advised. Maybe you’re also taking time from your workday to puzzle over algebra problems with your child, who’s been learning from home. And those are the relatively easy pivots — thousands have had to adjust to massive lifestyle changes due to loss of employment and seriously ill family members.
At Flexion, we’ve had to pivot, too. One of our long-standing clients, Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), is a leader in providing the assessments that help schools measure the progress of their students and the overall performance of teachers and schools. Traditionally, these tests — whether on paper or online — are administered in school and proctored by teachers who can visually confirm that, yes, it is the correct students taking the tests and, no, they aren’t Googling the answers. As many schools moved to distance learning this past spring, all that had to change.
DRC needed a couple of key things from Flexion, and the team — in collaboration with the DRC team — stepped up.
The first thing they needed was the ability to test kids easily from home. Before the pandemic, testing was done on a customized version of Chrome, modified to prevent students from navigating away from the test and only compatible with specified computers. Now DRC needed to deliver the test on a public browser, on whatever kind of computer might be available. Pivot.
They also needed to be able to proctor the exams remotely, so that teachers and administrators could be sure who’s taking the test. Maybe they could proctor the exam via Zoom, expecting students to stay in their video frames and engaged for the test’s length? Pivot.
And during all of this, they needed a new way to ensure that all the test questions, responses, and performance statistics stayed confidential. Respecting student and teacher privacy is important, even in this new environment. But it’s also important to keep the test questions confidential since the validity of the test (not to mention the value of the intellectual property) plummets if they’re exposed. Pivot.
We’re all still figuring this “new normal” out, and there are many more pivots to come. Flexion will continue to support DRC as distance learning grows and changes — but our team was able to step up and help make critical changes to allow the “normal” of assessing learning progress to be part of the “new.” We could do this because we work in a highly agile environment, where we ask what needs to be done first, and then we figure out the how — and if that doesn’t work, we what? Pivot!
