Revisely tackles teacher shortages: teachers can now outsource the marking and correction of students’ texts.

Breda (October 25, 2019) – Revisely is one of the biggest online text correction tools with more than 200,000 users. As a teacher, you were able to reduce your workload by outsourcing your correction work to colleagues through Revisely. Next year we will start to make this even easier. With our online platform, we want to help overbooked teachers by matching them with other professionals who can then mark, correct and give feedback on student assignments for them. This results in less workload for the teacher, more qualitative feedback for students and counteracts the major educational problem of our time: the teacher shortage.

Teacher shortages
Recently, the teacher shortage in education has been a lot in the news (in The Netherlands it even made it into the King’s speech to open the Parliamentary year). Because of the shortages, many schools have great difficulty filling vacancies. They are forced to enlarge classes and/or put unqualified teachers in front of the class and are often forced to cancel classes. Due to the high work pressure, fewer writing assignments are set each year because teachers simply do not have the time to correct these essays, papers, dissertations, letters, reports and other texts. This, of course, does not improve the quality of education. At the same time, the workload of secondary school teachers is increasing due to the ageing of the teacher population. Moreover, a quarter of the staff in secondary education suffer from burn-out complaints and are considering leaving education.

Outsource the correction of your students’ texts
This is how it will work: a teacher can easily place students’ texts on Revisely’s platform and mention important points for the evaluation of the assignment. The assignment is then matched to another professional with the most suitable profile to provide good qualitative feedback on the specific assignment. This external reviewer will be notified after which he/she goes through the texts and gives qualitative feedback and a grade per student, using rich comment sets consisting of clear explanations for the student. The teacher looks at the reviewed work and may add comments him/herself and then sends the feedback to the students. The teacher can assess the quality of the work of the external corrector and give a review.

All advantages in a nutshell
Busy teachers will have more time to focus on teaching. Revisely takes the most annoying work off the teachers’ hands, giving them more time to prepare for lessons. More time can therefore be spent on the actual reason they entered the field of education – being in front of a class and interacting with the students. At the same time, the employability of teachers is further improved as the scarce highly educated teacher does not have to do the work that another professional can do. Thanks to Revisely, students also receive more qualitative feedback, which further improves the learning process for them. Schools can save costs in two areas: the cost per text that is corrected is significantly lower and recruitment costs to attract the necessary teachers are avoided. Society as a whole benefits from the lower workload for teachers and the qualitative feedback improvement for students, while there are no extra investments in attracting teachers. Professionals who are currently not involved in the labour market can also start participating in education again. 

An experienced teacher such as Mart from the ambitious Rodenborch College also believes in the power of outsourcing correction work: 

“Many types and forms of text must meet specific criteria. These criteria can easily be standardised using the Revisely tool. In that case, it doesn’t really matter in terms of content which teacher corrects the text. In the case of the central final exams, we find it quite normal that this is checked by two different teachers, so why not the normal texts as well?” 

– Mart van Eijk, teacher at the Rodenborch College

About Revisely
Within Revisely, teachers can provide the submitted texts of students with observations and feedback by means of an extensive database. Revisely stores and archives the assignments and keeps a priority report for the pupil, teacher and school management. These reports make it possible to easily identify and differentiate bottlenecks. Various features can also be used in Revisely, such as checking for plagiarism, handing in teams and peer grading. Outsourcing of text correction with Revisely is our latest project.

Revisely was founded in 2014 by Jeroen Fransen and Jo Ritzen, the former Minister of Education in The Netherlands. We work together with teachers and students from the two largest school groups in the Netherlands, OMO and Carmel. Revisely has more than 200,000 users in the Netherlands, Spain, Finland, India and Italy in both secondary and higher education. We are proud to be partners with Iddink/magister.me, SOMtoday, Urkund, Brightspace, Van Dijk Educatie, Impact Accelerator, xEdu, Nvidia and AWS Edstart. Revisely is co-founder of the Dutch EdTech group The Dutch School. Revisely was in the finals at the Next Billion EdTech prize in Dubai 2018 and was semi-finalist at the Global EdTech Startups Awards 2019 in Frankfurt.

For additional press questions, please contact Jeroen Fransen by emailing jeroen.fransen@revise.ly, calling +31 (0)30 2270431, or checking out http://revise.ly/en/outsource-your-students-texts/.