Radically evolving technologies that have created a profoundly interconnected world have also rendered traditional, learning models obsolete.

 

With most institutions far behind the curve, it is critical to enable and empower learners with new, relevant approaches to learning. This includes developing new strategies, tools, and intelligent systems that allow students to create the learning experience best suited to them.

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Vision:

 

To advance learner autonomy and agency by leveraging learner data.

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Mission:

 

Provide learners, teachers, parents, and institutions with secure e-learning ecosystems, assessment / testing platforms, and learner intelligence systems through

• performance analytics

• computational psychometrics

• competence-based student models

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with the overall goal of

• improving holistic learning across skills

• increasing global foundational level literacy levels

• enhancing overall academic confidence and performance

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■stakeholders ■tools ■methods ■outcomes

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Why we Exist?

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As schools and colleges around the world shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, making the switch to online learning, students and teachers had to find ways to continue working together and staying connected. But perhaps the single greatest effect of the pandemic on education was the loss of agency and autonomy, particularly in students. 

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Therefore, we started with one overarching goal:

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• to make learners active participants in their learning processes rather than simply consumers of a service by advancing learner agency and autonomy.

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While in no way perfect, this project was launched by one such teacher to provide students a way to continue working on their skills from home. This was also to help fellow teachers to source materials that met international standards of learning and assessment, and could be assigned to students without the need for setting up time-consuming alternatives such as Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, or commercial LMS platforms like BlackBoard.

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Some of the design goals we had in mind were:

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• advance learner autonomy and self-regulation ("Am I  being consistent?", "Is there something specific I am struggling with?",  "Whats  my next step?"

• develop attention span, short-term memory, cognitive control and focus in learners ("How can I improve my focus?", "How  can I read better?", "How can I take better notes?")

• cultivate perseverance, persistence, and build healthy failure response and management skills ("What are my specific shortcomings and mistakes?", "What do I need to do to improve?" , " What is the best response to this?",  "Who can I ask for advice or help?")

• leverage technology to capture critical learner data ("What are my specific skills and sub-skills?", "What kind of questions am I good at?", "What kind of questions do I need to get better at?", "What are my performance levels across benchmarks and standards?",  "How do I feel when I encounter this type of challenge?"

• eliminate grading time and effort spent by teachers (Hurray!!! No Grading!!! Literally. None. Nada. And no more waiting on grades either!!! Yes. Teacher's are allowed to be lazy too. Just like you.)

• provide learners and teachers with insights built on solid data ("How does the class measure up to learning goals and set standards?", "How should we ajdust the curriculum to improve learner skill and outcomes?", "What do I need to revise or improve?", "What does my learning path look like across different skills?", "Am I ready for the TOEFL, IELTS, or the University English Exam?"

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You can ask and answer these and even more questions with the right data

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We continue to be a work in progress and learn through our mistakes to be better for the communities we wish to serve.

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We Saw An Opportunity

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As the number of teachers and learners that have benefited from Phantom Learning Labs grew, we realized that a wealth of valuable data was generated through online assessments that would have not been possible to collect via more common paper-based assessment methods. This presented an incredible opportunity to leverage that data to provide enhanced feedback to

• learners to better understand their own learning behavior

• teachers to help provide targeted feedback, personalized instruction, and appropriate intervention to students in the areas they need it most.

 

The Result: better information leads to better performance and more opportunity for transformation.

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inform -> perform -> transform

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Where we are now

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How do students generally receive feedback on assessments? Mostly, through numerical scores and letter grades.

Current assessment and evaluation practices almost exclusively use a system of binary (right vs wrong) marking combined with quantitative metrics (a numerical score, XX/20, or percentage, XX%) to gauge learner performance, Not learning.

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A student receives a score and a corresponding letter grade that provides a fairly useless measure of their performance against an arbitrary scale, with absolute disregard to their

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• learning styles and preferences

• levels of confidence

• natural aptitudes 

• optimal learning trajectories 

• cognitive flexibility and control 

• motivation

• behavior patterns 

• personal interests 

• specific strengths and weaknesses

• degrees of perseverance and persistence 

• degree of consistency 

• sense of responsibility and accountability 

• levels of peer engagement 

• failure response and management

• self-esteem 

 

and a multitude of other psychometric factors. It also does not take into account variability in teaching styles and pedagogical progression, facilitate teacher intervention tailored specifically to individual learner requirements, or measure efficacy of instruction.

 

Measuring learner performance without the right metrics, tools, and practices to inform students about how to do better strips them of the opportunity to self-govern and engage in a transformative learning process.

 

The result: students remain dis-empowered receivers of a service rather than active agents in the learning process.

 

The right data, leveraged correctly, can help change that.

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We begin with Guided-Autonomous Learning. Learn more here.

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Who We Are

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Phantom Learning Labs is an independent, digitally led online education and e-learning research organization comprised of a team of highly experienced educators looking to use their rich backgrounds in teaching, information technology, and data science to empower learners and educators through data-driven practices in learning and assessment. An abridged catalog of our interests can be found here.

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