We held a Focus Group meeting today with 8 secondary school students from Dublin in order to get feedback on how best the Classroom Winners website could help them improve their Exam Grades.
The students were encouraged to be as forthcoming as possible in their views – all feedback is welcome as long as it is honest and constructive.
The appearance of the site was debated, as was the messaging on the site, followed by an examination of the features of the site and how all of these could be improved.
As we discussed the feature in which students and teachers are encouraged to contribute questions of their own, one of the girls said: “Classroom Winners is a bit like Wikipedia for Exam Questions and Answers.”
When we asked her to elaborate on what she meant, she said: “Well, Wikipedia allows anyone to upload whatever content they want and then the ‘crowd’ or the ‘general public’ police this content to ensure it is accurate. Classroom Winners is basically doing the same thing for Exam Questions.”
Brilliant! It was the first time someone had actually captured in a short sentence exactly what Classroom Winners does. We had all been thinking about this, but none of us had articulated it so succinctly.
Of course, there are other elements and features of Classroom Winners, but the similarity with Wikipedia is striking when you consider the crowdsourcing and crowd-monitoring aspects of the platform.
As we state elsewhere on this website, we are on a mission to build the largest database of exam Questions and Answers on the web. Just like Wikipedia, we cannot do this by ourselves – it requires input from students and teachers, who know the course content better than anyone else. Our job is to provide the infrastructure and the rules to enable this to happen.
As such, every question must be approved by 3 independent moderators before it can be published on the site. We can go back and see exactly which 3 moderators approved every question, so moderators who repeatedly approve answers that are wrong will have their moderation privileges removed.
Additionally, beside every live question on the site is an option to Report a Question if the answer is wrong or the content is inappropriate. This again is harnessing the power of the crowd for the benefit of all students.
So, the student who said Classroom Winners is like Wikipedia for Exam Questions is not far off the mark!
