On-Line Learning: Vantage Learning Offers Student Writing Feedback at the Stroke of a Keyboard
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.

Imagine a tenth grade, Spanish-speaking student who is reading at a sixth grade level. She logs onto Vantage Learning’s MY Access!—an online, portfolio-based writing instruction program—and writes a practice essay in English in preparation for an upcoming state test. Voila! My Access! provides immediate feedback to the student in Spanish, at a sixth grade reading level, so that she can improve her English writing techniques in a variety of designated areas that will be evaluated on her state test.

Sound complicated? Not to Harry Barfoot, Vice-President of Vantage Labs, which developed the MY Access!  program to improve student writing proficiency in response to increased mandatory, high stakes state writing tests as well as the new writing requirement on the SAT I and ACT tests.  “MY Access! is a twenty-first century pencil,” explains Barfoot. “It’s as if the students had a writing coach sitting behind them, helping them through the writing process.” Students are able to write and revise as often as they like; their work is then analyzed based on over 300 semantic, syntactic, and discourse characteristics and scored on a four or six point scale. Teachers, who are theoretically freed up from the demands of tedious paper correcting and able to spend more time on instruction, can access the student writing portfolios online to monitor their students’ progress, understand areas of weakness, and tailor lesson plans to meet their specific needs.

In justifying the need for his product, Barfoot  points to the College Board-founded National Commission on Writing’s 2003 report to Congress, “The Neglected ‘R,’” that called for a writing revolution to return writing to its rightful place among the three “R’s” in the classroom. The Commission, which surveyed 120 major corporations employing eight million people, found writing to be a “threshold skill” for hiring and promoting and a necessary passport to professional opportunity in America’s increasingly white collar society.

MY Access! is far from the only online writing program on the market, but it may be the most popular, with several states, including California and Pennsylvania, using it extensively to help students meet state testing standards. In November, California’s Los Angeles Unified School District announced a three year, multi million dollar rollout of MY Access! in 93 of its secondary schools. 

Key to the success of  MY Access!  is what is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated scoring technologies in today’s marketplace, IntelliMetric. Developed in-house by Vantage Learning, IntelliMetric uses artificial intelligence to emulate the process carried out by human scorers when assessing a piece of writing. Until recently, few academicians believed that an inanimate computer could effectively grasp the art and nuance of writing. Yet in 1999, amidst a storm of controversy, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) became the first academic body to utilize automated essay scoring in a large-scale assessment, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the standardized test for business school admission. GMAC has just subcontracted with Vantage Learning to use its IntelliMetric Essay Scoring System on the GMAT’s. But Vantage Learning is not the only one clamoring for a piece of the profitable computer-generated scoring business. Educational Testing Service (ETS) sells a program called Criterion which uses the “e-rater” technology to score essays statewide in Indiana high schools. ETS, which administers the SAT and GRE (Graduate Records Examination), expects at least ten more states to adopt computerized essay scoring in the next several years.

So what’s in store for Vantage Learning as the appetite for online learning continues to grow among school districts and students? “We’re developing a tighter alignment of our writing prompts to the core basal reading textbooks so that we can more closely match our programs to the scope and sequence teachers are using in the classroom,” says Barfoot. “Take, for example, a thematic unit that students are working on in citizenship. There are different prompts in MY Access! that are about citizenship. Students will be writing about citizenship and its importance, so we’re helping them not only practice their writing, but we’re also helping them develop higher order thinking in the process,” adds Barfoot.

And for the proliferating field of on-line learning—which incorporates anything from computerized college degree programs to such businesses as Growing Stars, an online personal tutoring service based in California whose tutors live in India – the opportunities are endless. Key among the issues for future study will be quality assurance, particularly where public monies are concerned. Indeed, the newly formed North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL), launched in 2003 to keep pace with the “rapid development in the field of K-12 online learning,” notes in its website that “vigilant monitoring is a must.” But for scores of students across the country, the ease and comparatively low cost of logging on will continue to drive the burgeoning online learning industry.#

Read more about online learning on the college level on page 20.