A Conference like no other: the 9th FLIP+ Annual Event
Next month, on June 18-19, the National Agency for Education in Lithuania will host the 9th FLIP+ Annual Event, a gathering of education stakeholders and experts who come there to share. The founding members were public institutions who had pivoted from pencil-and-paper tests to digital assessments for their national examinations: they wanted to exchange experiences and find ways to share items. The organisation gained traction and momentum, membership expanded to included individual experts, but sharing remains the core value. This is an event without vendor booths, no-one is trying to bring new solutions to the market, because the focus is on how to share, how to collaborate, how to exchange. This year’s theme is “Assessing Tomorrow’s Learning – Collaborative Innovation in Action – Where human expertise, collaboration and innovation shape assessment”. No wonder that our founder Steve Dept feels at home in this community.
I look forward to hearing the updates of the working groups that continue to improve the FLIP+ Library, a collaborative platform for sharing educational assessment resources across countries, languages, and subjects. This digital library allows members to upload their own materials in their own language and also to access, browse and borrow materials uploaded by other members. cApStAn provides a translation service through its solution Toledo (a web API) that allows the client’s platform to integrate instant machine translation of the resources uploaded by their users to the digital library.
There will be presentations on neuro-diversity and accessibility, on literacy in a minority language context, on using chatbots to develop formative feedback skills on digitisation of national assessments on governance and quality in standardised testing. At this event, my priority is to explore how to include more education stakeholders from the Global South in the conversation. Pierre Varly from the University of Mons and Steve Dept will share their experience about international large-scale assessment in a context of diversity of languages and the transition to computer-based testing (CBT) and computerised adaptive testing (CAT) in Sub-Saharan Africa. Steve will then introduce a presentation by Carmen Strigel from Tangerine Central, an open-source digital assessment platform widely used in resource-constrained contexts, and often deployed with the help of local partnerships. We expect three energising days in Vilnius, catching up with peers, with friends, with mentors and enjoy networking at its best.