BOnLine School – Suspending Class Not Suspending Learning

In view of the spread of Covid-19, the learning progress of students has become a significant  concern in education community. Launched in February 2020, BOnLine School is an innovative online learning platform developed by Vioo Co. Ltd, an information technology company, and Assessment International to better prepare secondary students for their upcoming public exams in Hong Kong. BOnLine School currently covers five HKDSE subjects including English Language, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. More than 300 teachers from 160 secondary schools in Hong Kong have registered and participated in this project.

Innovative Online Learning and Assessment Platform

Unlike typical online learning platforms, BOnLine School provides not only questions for exercises and mock exams but also comprehensive assessments for student performance. It is also essential ensure that the number of questions and the poll size are statistically feasible to achieve comprehensive assessments in terms of data collection. As of today, approximately two thousand multiple-choice questions are provided and every question is carefully sorted and labelled by subject experts for assessment purposes. In addition to the levels of difficulties, questions for Mathematics and Science subjects are further grouped by strands and topics, while questions for English Languages are grouped by tested abilities.

Exercise Modes and Assessments

Various modes of exercises and tests are provided at BOnLine School. Each subject teacher is considered as a primary controller and has full administrative rights to choose the contents and prepare assignments for his/her students (See Figure 1).To further supplement the needs of test creations, each subject teacher can create his/her customized in-school or class exercises by choosing and resorting questions from the existing question bank (See Figure 2). User privacy is our top priority at BOnLine School. All the statistics and results of these customized tests are confidential and can only be reviewed by the test creator. Upon teacher’s approval in his/her designated subject(s), participating students can choose to answer random question sets for self-evaluation, pre-defined public question sets for overall comparisons with thousands of question takers or class exercises. After each test set, students can review the solutions in the written format or videos (See Figure 3).

Subject Assessments and Reports

Upon the completion of question sets, a comprehensive assessment report for each subject can be generated to evaluate students’ performance through the comparison with other students based on Big Data analysis of current question data and the historical statistics of similar mock exams and public exams. Both Mathematics and the three Science subjects are rated by strands and topics, and the English Language subject is rated by student’s relative abilities. Both estimated ratings and time analysis can be treated as indicators to evaluate student’s potential strengths and weaknesses for exam preparation in various aspects in each subject. The recent assessment reports also include recommendations to improve any specific ability for the English Language subject. While each student can access his/her personalized reports for different subjects, each subject teacher also has a summarized class report to monitor students’ progress and performance. (See Figure 4 & Figure 5)

Future Developments

Led by our assessment experts, Dr. G. Z. Luo, Dr. Ivan Lau and Dr. R. Chang, some initial successes have been observed in the early phrase. BOnLine School platform will continue to improve the current scope of services. In the future, we plan to gradually introduce some premium features such as progressive learning reports, Adaptive Learning utilized Artificial Intelligence System, exam paper generator and teaching videos.

A teacher handbook with additional information and feature explanations is available for free download after teacher’s signup (See Figure 6). Please visit BOnLine School website (https://school.bonline.com.hk/teacher-registration) or contact Mr Tsang (Tel: 3150 6041 or Email: [email protected]) for details.