Modern Technology and Assessment and Certification - Introducing Ruby

Project Details

Ruby is a world class, easily navigable rubric, designed, developed and delivered by the Assessment Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. Informed by nearly a decade of research and responding to genuine concerns from teachers, Ruby is the future of evidence-based assessment in the classroom, and is designed for use by partners and clients of the ARC.

A user-friendly and reliable tool, Ruby embraces cutting-edge automation to monitor, track and support developmental learning, and demonstrate progress at any point in time. Ruby removes the need for strong data literacy competency from teachers, creating significant efficiencies in the classroom, and enabling regular assessment to be undertaken in a social environment.

What can Ruby do?

• Build modules, lesson plans and work units to any competency-based curriculum objective.
• Conduct formative and summative assessment of student learning, prior to, during and on completion of any teaching program.
• Profile and analyse each student’s level of attainment and rate of growth, and provide micro-credentials of student progress.
• Motivate student progress with the automatic generation of digital badges as competencies are mastered, incentivising and celebrating achievement.

With a global shift towards competency based education, Ruby is helping teachers adjust their practice from content-based teaching by providing new ways to assess and recognise developmental learning across a range of domains. Ruby supports the improved quality and collection of teacher judgements, and provides intelligent feedback to students, stimulating learner agency.

A key feature of Ruby is the capacity to provide immediate, clear and accurate reports to multiple audiences, including:

• provision of convenient summary of student’s overall learning across skill areas.
• generation of progress and readiness profiles by class/school/student.

Ruby is available anywhere, at any time, with this secure information accessible on digital devices including tablets and mobile phones.

Ruby is responsive to the modern classroom and supports multiple modes of assessment including:

• standardised tests
• teachers’ quizzes and tests
• teacher judgement
• peer assessment
• self assessment
• automated analytics-based assessment.

Ruby is available to research partners of the Assessment Research Centre, and provides national and international level data security.

Researchers

• Enterprise Professor Sandra Milligan, Project Lead
• Richard Xu, Technical Lead