ChromEx to Gothenburg
A digital test application for 66,000 students
The challenge
In 2016, Online Partner was contacted by the city of Gothenburg. They had evaluated several different solutions for digital tests, but none of them could meet their requirements; a cost-effective application for digital tests that does not require much training and administration. Online Partner accepted the challenge of creating a prototype that could match the requirements in Gothenburg.
Minimal need for education
The teachers already had several different applications and administrative systems that they were expected to use. Adding even more applications will mean high training costs and dissatisfaction among the city’s 11,000.
No administration
The solutions that the city had previously tried had required a lot of support from the schools’ IT managers and administrators to produce a test that the teachers could use. Having a special administrator to handle a trial application will be far too expensive. Teachers must be able to handle all parts of the application themselves.
Costs
All the solutions that were evaluated were too resource intensive due to high licensing costs and because they took so long of teachers and administrative staff. The cost of a new solution must be minimized if the city of Gothenburg can use it.
Technical requirements
Basic text formatting features: size, bold and italic style and support for 10,000 characters.
- Automated facilitation for more than 66,000 students
- Lock internet access to avoid cheating
- Disconnected cache if internet connection is lost
- The computer unit must be cleaned when the sample is delivered
Solution
Online Partner accepted the challenge, and in the autumn of 2016, our solution, ChromEx, could be used by Gothenburg. Here are the three most important components of our solution:
Minimize the need for education
Our conclusion to minimize the need for education was that we needed to use the knowledge that already existed among school staff and students. We used the same behavior, navigation and design that Google uses in its own applications. This was facilitated by Google’s framework for design, graphics and icons available for free.
Our starting point is also that teachers’ time should be spent as much as possible on their primary tool, Google Workspace. That’s why we built integrations with Google Classroom, Drive, Google Docs and Calendar, among others. This makes ChromEx exceptionally easy to use, and most teachers do not need training at all.
No administration
Who should take the test, when should the test be taken, in what subject and with what resources? Thanks to the integration with Google Workspace, we can use the Google accounts that already exist in the school organization. The account is used, among other things, to log in to ChromEx, which facilitates the entire procedure, including administration. Once the test is complete, it will be converted to a Google Docs and stored on Drive. Here the teacher can easily find the test, make markings and comments in a way that they are already used to.
Costs
We have made ChromEx long-term cost-effective thanks to:
- We follow Google’s framework for design and graphics interface, thus avoiding costly development work.
- User-driven development where we plan and develop new functions at the request of teachers.
- ChromEx is built on the Google Cloud Platform, which is the foundation of security, scalability and cost-effectiveness
What started with a collaboration and a prototype resulted in a completely new application for digital samples – ChromEx. Today, ChromEx is used all over the world, and millions of tests and exams have been performed. The application has an impressive list of features and is continuously developed according to the teachers’ wishes for improvements and adjustments.
