Turnitin Acquires LightSide Labs to Support Formative Feedback on Student Writing

Turnitin, the leaders in originality checking and online grading, today announced the company has reached a definitive agreement to acquire LightSide Labs, an online service that uses machine learning to provide real-time, automated feedback on student writing. The agreement will allow Turnitin to integrate its leading originality checking and online grading features with LightSide Labs’ innovative approach to providing high quality feedback to students across the writing process. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Seven Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Multiple-Choice Questions

The goal of any well-constructed test is to test students’ expertise on a topic and not their test-taking skills. We need to eliminate as many flaws in our questions as we can to “provide a level playing field for testwise and not-so-testwise students. The probability of answering a question correctly should relate to an examinee's expertise on the topic and should not relate to their expertise on test-taking strategies.” (NMBE, 2001, p 19)

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Alternative Assessment Methods for the Online Classroom

Tests and quizzes are often the primary means of assessing online learner performance; however, as Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, online instructors and coauthors of numerous online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), point out, there are more effective and less problematic alternatives.

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