Pluralsight introduces course assessments

Today we are excited to announce a new feature coming to our online learning system: course assessments! An assessment is a short test associated with one of our courses designed to test understanding of the material and learning objectives.

Assessments have been widely requested and anticipated amongst our users. By taking assessments, individuals can ultimately measure how much they’ve learned by watching our courses and understand their individual ROI. Corporate customers can use assessments (and the reports associated with them) to understand how their developers are progressing over time and measure the total ROI for the organization.

However, before we start scoring students on the assessments, we want to ensure that our community of users has a chance to help vet the questions.  So we’ve designed an assessment beta process that all of our assessments will pass through before we take them live and start tracking scores. The beta process allows our community to provide feedback, so we can fix typos, grammar, and re-word questions that are confusing.

Once we feel confident that a particular assessment is solid, we will “take it live” on the course page and allow Plus subscribers to begin taking it for official scores. When you “pass” the assessment (with a score of 70% or higher), you’ll be able to print a course certificate and it will show up on your permanent Pluralsight transcript.

It’s important to note that the scope of the assessment beta process isn’t temporary. Every course we publish in the future will come with an assessment that the community will need to vet, so the process is intended to be permanent. When a new course is published, the associated assessment will enter this beta process, and once validated and approved, it will then appear on the course page.

Right now we have 150 courses with assessments that need to be vetted. So we need your help! All Pluralsight subscribers can participate in the assessment beta process starting now. Simply login and click on beta-test an assessment (in the footer) or navigate to the course library page and click “Get Started!”

When you do, you’ll have to first take a sample assessment that’s meant to teach you how our assessment system works. Once you’ve completed the test run, you’ll then be shown the current list of courses with assessments available for testing.

You can beta test up to 10 assessments every 30-days. You will have 1-hour to complete each assessment but only 1-minute to complete each question. This allows you to pause between questions and provide feedback along the way. If you feel a particular question is confusing, worded poorly, or overly tricky, please let us know through the feedback mechanism. We’ve also provided simple thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons that you can use to tell us if you think the question is good or bad without having to take too much time. Please tell us what you think!

The more feedback we receive throughout this process, the better our assessments will become over time, which will make this an even better online learning community.

Check it out and let us know what you think!