Introducing Blossary.com: The Essential Resource Every College Professor Must Have For college professors, one of the most time consuming tasks is the grading of papers and reports and subsequent evaluation of students’ academic performance. Whether history, economics or English literature,
reading and assessing students’ work –
especially with large classes – can take hours on end and, more importantly, becomes prone to oversight and error over the long hours of reading and thanks to strict time constraints . To address this challenge, many college professors employ teaching assistants (TAs) to grade student papers. While TAs may be excellent for grading math and science work where there are usually definite answers, they have a harder time with subjects focused on the social sciences and humanities. Most TAs are students themselves and don't have the knowledge and experience of a professor so their evaluation of other students’ work may lead to inaccurate evaluation. Blossary.com for a More Modern Methodology
Blossary.com gives professors a tool with which to standardize TAs understanding of the material and the accepted grading methodology. By creating a single Blossary that covers the pertinent terms and concepts necessary to truly grasp the course, all future TAs will have the training they need without having to attend any lengthy meetings. A cloud-based Blossary allows TAs to access their training materials and the knowledge they need wherever they are and whenever they need it, thus unburdening professors while simultaneously improving evaluation quality. In addition, if there’s anything that TAs notice students are having a particularly difficult time understanding, Blossary.com provides a forum for them to discuss it among themselves, share it with the professor, and craft solutions to improve recitation lessons and general course quality.
Blossary.com for a Higher Quality Course
Blossary.com offers a revolutionary approach to classroom teaching by making the evaluation of your students’ performance easier and more efficient, utilizing a quantitative approach so a student’s understanding of subject matter can be judged more objectively. Instead of asking students to write a paper upon reading a book
assignment, instructors can have them compile a Blossary – possibly with a collaborative team – that lists all the key points in the book as terms and then define each according to what they have read. Characters, events, places, and objects in works of literature are all terms that can be defined and described. Similarly, economics, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences use what may be traditional vocabulary but in novel contexts and with nontraditional definitions. With Blossary creation as a homework assignment, TAs or professors can quickly and easily check and compare students’ work, the number and quality of terms across classes, and can plainly see terms and concepts with which students are struggling. What’s more, because Blossary.com is cloud-based, it allows for student homework submission and instructor evaluation from anywhere and at any time.
An added benefit of the Blossary.com approach is that professors can collect all the student-created Blossaries and compile a master course Blossary that not only grows over time to include more terms but lets instructors see how changes in course structure and teaching materials influence students’ learning from one semester to the next. Click here to see some sample classroom Blossaries and find out how Blossary.com can transform education at all levels and for all invovled.