Instructors Get Free Courseware
Frank Lucente | Assoc. Professor at Westmoreland County Comm. College
Frank started using TestOut Office Pro and TestOut IT Fundamentals Pro online courseware in 2020. He’s seen some incredible results.
Kim Arlia | Adjunct professor at Central Piedmont College
Busy adjunct frees up her time while helping more non-traditional and working students by reducing face-to-face class time with TestOut Office Pro.
Spencer DeGraw | Professor and Program Director at Ensign College
Spencer's TestOut Pro certified IT students get the same jobs & pay as 4-year degree grads with the level playing field that TestOut courseware provides.
Jed Patrick | IT Prog. Coordinator at Mountainland Applied Technology
TestOut Pro Certifications put students in a hands-on testing environment where they can prove what they can do.
Kris Rosenberg | Professor & Program Dir. at Oregon Institute of Technology
TestOut Pro Certifications help schools emphasis skills-based training curriculums that produce job-ready graduates.
Bill Baur | Professor at Sussex Community College
Professor has extra time to motivate students because TestOut Office Pro saves him hassles and headaches grading and tracking students' progress.
Bill Baur has been finding a lot of success using TestOut Office Pro to teach Microsoft Office skills. He and other instructors in his department have used it for several years in his Comms 110 class at Sussex County Community College in Newton, New Jersey.
Bill likes to use TestOut Office Pro courseware because it saves him time grading and tracking his student’s progress. He uses the extra time to motivate and help stragglers.
He said in partnering with TestOut, “It’s a big benefit to have a professor who can talk to the students and help them feel like they’re making progress. It’s motivating for them to hear that.”
He finds when students are not doing their work, TestOut’s rich reporting makes it very easy for him to point out what they need to do. He gives them the ability to do missed work and catch up, so they don’t get discouraged.
TestOut’s rich reporting makes it very easy for him to point out what his students need to do.
Bill and his department switched from using another publisher because students had to download files, work on them, and then re-upload each file. Many of their students struggled with this.
Before using TestOut, Bill manually graded papers, projects, and the final exam. He said it would take him forever. Now, he doesn’t need to do any of that with TestOut’s auto-graded activities and assessments.
Bill thinks TestOut’s lab simulations are a good way for him and his colleagues to teach because Skill Labs describe what to do. Then Challenge Labs test their students’ abilities. A text or video hint can show them what to do whenever they don’t know how to do a particular task.
“When they get it right, they get a positive reaction. It’s a good way of reinforcing the skill I’ve just taught them to do. They feel good about it when they succeed.” he said.
TestOut Office Pro works seamlessly with his college’s Canvas LMS system to track students’ points.
In the past, he used to send his students their grades several times during the term. It took up a lot of his time to email them individually; otherwise, they would see each other’s grades.
With TestOut, students get instant remediation on every assignment. They can see how they’re doing without waiting for their scores. He commented that having everything computerized has been a wonderful advantage for him and his students.
When they get it right, they get a positive reaction. It’s a good way of reinforcing the skill I’ve just taught them to do.
Bill assigns his students TestOut labs for homework in all three types of face-to-face, hybrid, and online courses he teaches. He created five projects for his students to do in the Office 365 application.
[Recently, TestOut Office Pro created a new Live App feature in our Microsoft Office courses, with labs that are pre-loaded with data for in-app projects that are auto-graded.]
Bill’s students can get a lab done in five minutes. He thinks the average time for his students is about 15 minutes per lab. Some students may take a half-hour, depending upon the difficulty of the lab.
He recommends his students go back and watch TestOut videos if they miss class or are unfamiliar with a topic taught—they’re around five minutes long.
Bill has a whole setup where he shows his students at the beginning of the term what they need to do with everything clearly laid out. This way, they know what to expect without any surprises. He generally assigns six labs every week.
He finds if anybody is confused, it’s because they don’t come to class or they don’t look at the assignments. Any serious student will do fine in his class, as he makes it easy for them to plan around their other courses.
The first couple of classes are critical because he’s had students who came in late and didn’t get the first lessons where the labs are explained. Bill tells them, ‘Look, you can watch the TestOut videos. You can see what you missed.’ If they don’t, they’re lost, whereas the rest of the class is fine.
Reiterating the critical role of educators in the learning process, he said:
“It’s very important for a person to explain the process to them. You can do the work in TestOut without anybody explaining it to you, and that’s what’s good about it. But I think students need that human interaction that gets them motivated to do it. Once they do, they can see, ‘Oh, it’s not so horrible. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”
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Frank Lucente | Assoc. Professor at Westmoreland County Comm. College
Frank started using TestOut Office Pro and TestOut IT Fundamentals Pro online courseware in 2020. He’s seen some incredible results.
Kim Arlia | Adjunct professor at Central Piedmont College
Busy adjunct frees up her time while helping more non-traditional and working students by reducing face-to-face class time with TestOut Office Pro.
Spencer DeGraw | Professor and Program Director at Ensign College
Spencer's TestOut Pro certified IT students get the same jobs & pay as 4-year degree grads with the level playing field that TestOut courseware provides.
Jed Patrick | IT Prog. Coordinator at Mountainland Applied Technology
TestOut Pro Certifications put students in a hands-on testing environment where they can prove what they can do.
Kris Rosenberg | Professor & Program Dir. at Oregon Institute of Technology
TestOut Pro Certifications help schools emphasis skills-based training curriculums that produce job-ready graduates.
Bill Baur | Professor at Sussex Community College
Professor has extra time to motivate students because TestOut Office Pro saves him hassles and headaches grading and tracking students' progress.
