We hope you are enjoying your summer, and that you are also spending some time getting ready for the challenges of the coming year. If you believe in teaching with formative assessments (as we do) part of that is planning your assessment content to determine mastery for each topic and guide the instruction needed for each student.

To that end, we recently released the first free modern (Common Core, PARCC and SBAC style) assessment tool. It is also the only assessment tool oriented around associating resources with assessment items. When students struggle with an assessment OpenEd will recommend resources to garner the necessary skills.

Take a look at this video from Brandon Dorman on building formative assessments with the new assessment tool:

(the direct link for this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv6M2zveuyY)

We also want announce our “Question Bounty program”. We are building many questions and assessments ourselves to cover Common Core standards, all released open source via Creative Commons license. We will also be announcing partnerships with paid assessment providers soon. Basically we will offer paid formative assessment item bank content as part of an OpenEd “subscription” (a small monthly fee of $10 to access all paid private content). But we want to encourage the community to contribute to the open free items as we are doing.

So here is what we are offering. For every assessment question you create which meets the following criteria we will credit you $10 towards a subscription (i.e. one month of free usage of paid content) allowing access to paid provider content. For an assessment item (question) to qualify it should:
1) be aligned to a Common Core standard
2) get used by another teacher 
3) does NOT get flagged as misaligned or otherwise inappropriate by another teacher within one month

We will have a “wall of fame” soon showing the volume of contributions for each teachers (since we need the report to give you credit for subscription anyway). We will also be featuring particularly good questions that are created on an ongoing basis. Please let us know if you have any questions about our Question Bounty program or our assessment tool in general.