MERRIMAC, MASS. (March 18, 2022) — Muzzy Lane, a global leader in educational simulations, has partnered with Education Design Lab (the Lab) to create scalable, engaging assessments for the Lab micro-credentialing courses.
As part of the partnership, Muzzy Lane will use their expertise in creating simulations to assess student skills and learning. These immersive, engaging assessments will ask students to apply what they’ve learned rather than simply recalling answers. The partnership will also allow the Lab to scale by providing automatically scored assessments for complex skills.
For example, the automated assessment for the Critical Thinking Micro-credential takes 30-45 minutes for a student to complete. It then provides facilitators a summative deep dive into the student’s skill performance. A dashboard visualizes the count of correct and incorrect answers for specific questions helping facilitators spot skill deficits among their students and make informed decisions about how to close those gaps. Partners will be able to choose between the existing facilitator-graded assessments or the new auto-assessment.
“Education Design Lab has a long history of serving education equity by helping learners of all backgrounds demonstrate their skills and competencies,” said Muzzy Lane’s CEO, David McCool. “We look forward to raising awareness with the Lab team to make these skills and resources visible to more employers and thus valuable to more students by providing assessments that are relevant, objective, and scalable.”
The Lab and Muzzy Lane have also collaborated with others on the XCredit project, which is designed to provide credit for experiences individuals have acquired informally and are often undocumented or recognized. The first use case designed to help veterans transitioning into the civilian workforce and unemployed or underemployed civilians looking for jobs, XCredit helps to make the value of overlooked skills more visible.
The Lab is a pioneer of innovative digital credentialing, having previously created 21st Century Skills Micro-credentials, which demonstrate competence in high-demand soft skills—such as empathy, critical thinking, intercultural fluency, and collaboration—that have traditionally been difficult to assess.
“The ability to scale the assessment of 21st-century skills is critically important to documenting learning achievement, but also the recognition of lived experiences,” said Naomi Boyer, Executive Director of Digital Transformation at the Lab. “Our partnership with Muzzy Lane has allowed us to create next-generation assessments that will ultimately empower individuals to showcase what they know and can do in ways that lead to job opportunities.”
Both companies will offer these assessments to their respective customers. For more information about these assessments and what this means for you by contacting Muzzy Lane here.
About Muzzy Lane
Muzzy Lane builds technology to empower authors to create “no coding required” online simulations that develop and auto-assess skills. The company’s goal is to get thousands of educators, instructional designers, and course developers building with Muzzy Lane. The company believes in empowering teachers, not replacing them. Learn more at MuzzyLane.com.
About Education Design Lab
The Lab is a national nonprofit that co-designs, prototypes, and tests education-to-workforce models through a human-centered design process focused on understanding learners’ experiences, addressing equity gaps in higher education, and connecting new majority learners to economic mobility. Learn more at eddesignlab.org.
