New Social Hub for Real-Time Learning Assessment Released by Explorance

Explorance’s formative assessment tool, Bluepulse™, creates an open channel of communication between instructors and students for anonymous, constructive social feedback, which empowers teaching excellence as well as learning improvement.

Montreal, Quebec – May 5, 2014 –  Explorance, the leading provider of Learning Experience Management (LEM) solutions, announces today the introduction of Bluepulse™, a social formative assessment tool for learning. A real-time free-flowing collaborative hub, Bluepulse enables students and instructors to better interact and enhance learning through improvement-based initiatives and continuous feedback.

As social networks are becoming an integral part of daily life, educational institutions face a major challenge to keep up with the changing trends. While the millennial students are a generation of tech-savvy, fast-paced, connected individuals, most institutions are still gathering student feedback using paper, or only at the end of term. End-of-term course evaluation tools are usually structured questionnaires that ask students to address feedback systematically. Students often choose to share their in-term comments on alternative platforms, including Facebook and ratemyprofessor.com, which enable them to evaluate instructors in a more unstructured manner from their computer, tablet and/or mobile phone. Though these platforms enable students to comment on their courses in a more social manner, the feedback provided is rarely constructive as it is not provided through an official channel, limiting faculty’s ability to learn from it.

In order to complement course evaluations, Explorance has developed Bluepulse, a unique online social hub for Learning Experience Management (LEM) that can be accessed from any device. Through Bluepulse, students share their suggestions or pressing issues anytime through free-style “tweets”. Instructors can ask students to rate teaching aspects and proposed measures to enhance the course. In order to assist faculty in evaluating the success of their improvement initiatives, Bluepulse produces simple charts which summarize the evolution of student perception throughout the course. “By facilitating direct communication between teachers and students and providing accessible data, Bluepulse enables instructors to better understand and address students’ expectations,” says Professor Geoffrey Crisp, Dean of Learning and Teaching, Academic Portfolio, RMIT University.

Available exclusively to the instructors, not the administration, Bluepulse data facilitates continuous learning experience improvement.  By providing valuable suggestions and straightforward data to instructors, the tool creates a judgment-free environment conducive to improvement, increasing instructor endorsement. Bluepulse was also developed to increase student engagement. Since students can see how their feedback is impacting their own learning experience during the term, they have an incentive to continue using Bluepulse. “By enabling students and instructors to establish a social dialog throughout the term in a constructive manner, Bluepulse actively engages students, instructors and educational institutions in improving the learning experience for all,” says Samer Saab, Explorance’s CEO.

Bluepulse is available for most popular learning management solutions (LMS) including Blackboard Learn™, Moodle, Desire2Learn Learning Suite and Instructure Canvas. For further information, view the attached Bluepulse videos about Explorance’s social formative assessment tool. Find out how Bluepulse can ignite an active dialog to assist your education institution with assessment for learning.

Contact: Gil Gruber Explorance, Inc. (514) 238-7766 ggruber@explorance.com