Powerful Edtech that is enabling the migration from Classroom To Couch
By AR Swaminathan
Co-founder & CEO
Digital transformation is no more an option to procrastinate for educational institutions. There is a crisis here, and going digital is absolutely essential for survival. Recent directives from the UGC Panel on Academic Calendar Management seem to indicate that institutions must gear up to face any situation, and must be equipped to continue their instruction without interruption. One of the most important suggestions by the panel was to make online learning and assessments a regular practice.
Camu Online Examinations is a holistic solution for Institutions to conduct both the Continuous assessment tests and Terminal Examinations. What does Camu offer to institutions?
Open book tests are going to become a regular practice. It would challenge the question banks and the approach to creating assessment papers. Conducting online tests as basic as MCQs and short descriptive answers is a ready feature available in most solutions. Camu extends these by allowing the students to scan and attach diagrams as responses to the questions which will increase the level of engagement on the question. This allows teachers to get creative in the ways they ask questions while the type of question remains simple and the effort spent is small. Options to jumble questions and responses, timing the questions and the entire tests, setting the exact start and end of the test are all controls that institutions can get.
Camu is an enterprise solution designed to cater to a wide variety of educational institutions. This means that Camu readily supports multiple question paper types. Things such as having sets of question papers, like in the controller of examination setup, are possible to mimic in the digital space. Teachers can set up open book tests while allowing students to make only time-bound submissions. Question paper can be made available to the students at a predetermined time. On the other hand, students would be able to scan their answer scripts from the mobile phone and send it as an attachment for evaluation. The entire process would still be under the governance of the controller of examinations.
There are a number of factors involved in the conduct of online examinations that are beyond the control of students and the examiners. This naturally leads to anxiety. Doubts about losing internet connectivity is the biggest of them all. Camu offers many options to handle exceptions arising out of any reason. Some of these include extension of time for specific students, allowing retake of exams, ability to make announcements as the exam is happening, constant communication to build up to the examination and so on. With these features, students and examiners can rest their anxieties and focus on the critical tasks.
Camu comes with the highest level of security and reliability. Over 400 institutions are simultaneously using the system, with more than a million students and 50,000 teachers interacting on several academic tasks. Purely on the number of tests as a barometer, Camu has successfully seen through more than 100,000 tests conducted across institutions and programs already.