EduCompass

EduCompass is an online platform developed at Phillips Academy that serves as a content repository system, and supports adaptive placement and skill assessment testing.

Tang Fellows

Jacque Hugon ’79, Fellow

Jacque Hugon ’79

Fellow

Jacques Hugon joined the Tang Institute in 2015 to focus on the development of homegrown technical solutions in support of Andover’s faculty, students, and external partners. Those solutions include EduCompass and Amplify.

EduCompass (www.educompass.net) is used by Phillips Academy to assess incoming students in math, music and world languages, and assist department chairs in placing students in these disciplines before they arrive on campus. EduCompass is also used by other programs on campus, such as (MS)2 and Summer Session for math placement, as well as several independent schools that have joined the platform to administer placement tests in math and world languages.

Amplify (amplify.educompass.net) started as a content repository for math questions used in placement tests and has evolved into a homework platform for math and chemistry, leveraging the ~10,000 questions the Andover faculty has created over the years. Amplify lets faculty curate and share math and chemistry problems with other teachers and gives Andover students a platform on which they can practice and hone their skills.

Prior to joining the Institute, Hugon served as an instructor in mathematics and computer science at Phillips Academy from 2001 to 2015.

Hugon began his career as a software engineer and manager in the high-tech industry, and was involved in entrepreneurial ventures in the fields of video game design, personal computer peripherals, and electronic TV program guides. Hugon holds AB, SM, and MBA degrees from Harvard University.

Projects

EduCompass

EduCompass is an online platform developed at Phillips Academy to support the work of our faculty and students. EduCompass allows our faculty to create and curate content (currently around 10,000 math, chemistry and world languages questions) which can then be re-used in a variety of ways. EduCompass features an adaptive assessment test environment used to place incoming students in math, music, art, and world languages, as well as a homework platform with built-in automated help.

Benefits

One of the main benefits of EduCompass is that assessments can be customized to include heuristics to suggest the best entry point in our curriculum in math, world languages, music, etc., assisting the work of department chairs with measurable data points. Additionally, metrics from the gathered data can inform instructors about students, courses, as well as the actual content used in testing. This continuous feedback loop can support our faculty as they evolve our curriculum for the future.

Challenges

Changing how people teach, and learn, can be hard, especially when such change also requires learning new technology. Change requires internal product champions among the faculty given time to create and curate new content. One point of emphasis for EduCompass has been to make it easy to reuse content, whether in the form of topic-centric building blocks for assessments, or problem sets tailored to a particular lesson for homework. This partnership between technology and faculty serves as an enduring example of how the Tang Institute promotes innovation shaping the future of learning.

Takeaways & Best Practices

EduCompass is currently used by eight top schools besides Andover for a variety of learning management applications — from tracking student performance to placing students in classes. EduCompass is a prime example of the Tang Institute’s ability to uphold Phillips Academy’s mission to be a private school with a public purpose.

Teachers and administrators throughout Phillips Academy use EduCompass to better understand student competencies. With the ability to understand student competencies through clear quantitative data, instructors are able to make better informed decisions about student learning and intervene more quickly when problems arise

EduCompass aligns course placements to student levels, makes assessing performance data easier, and reduces student stress. By aligning a student’s skill set to a course, EduCompass relieves the burden of having to drop a course level or jump ahead.

Bottom Line

The combination of flexible technology and rich content designed by our faculty offers a wide range of potential applications to support the work of faculty and their students within and outside of Andover.

“We have used EduCompass for validation testing and proficiency testing...we wanted to figure out what the algebra-based skills going into and coming out of courses were. I don’t know what we would have done without EduCompass...”

Andrew Bartlettmath instructor, Loomis Chaffee