There’s no denying that some aspects of education are significantly enriched with online tools. Just think of how technology has helped us during the pandemic with the digital classrooms, virtual meetings, and online testing environments. Even when all this is over, some educational tools will continue to be used due to their ability to enrich both teaching and learning, like online assessment platforms. Because of this, teachers need to stay on top of the game by creating a resourceful toolbox with some of the most useful online platforms for educators - which is where we come in.
In this article, we’ll round up the 20 best online assessment tools for 2023. Whether we’re talking about a blended learning environment, a flipped classroom, a hybrid classroom, or an eLearning education, the following platforms can help teachers easily plan, share, track, and evaluate students’ knowledge.
The 20 Best Online Assessment Platforms for 2023
All the tools on our list provide useful resources that can be used in almost any classroom, but that doesn’t mean that you absolutely need them. Let’s see what each tool is about, what it offers, and how it can help you achieve your teaching goals. Compare them and choose the one(s) that suit(s) your teaching methodologies best.
Moddle
Let’s start with the industry leader and the world’s most popular learning management system - Moodle. It’s an online learning solution that serves the needs of thousands of universities and schools worldwide.
Within minutes teachers can create their own learning site where students will get access to video lectures, books, texts, presentations, and other learning materials.
One of the best things about Moodle is its amazing product development. In other words, Moodle has earned its stellar reputation by being incredibly user-friendly, with elaborate documentation that leaves no room for questions, even if you’re a first-time user.
In Moodle, teachers can easily set up their course, upload course materials, add students, track progress, use assignments to assess students, post discussions in a forum-like style, test students through quizzes, and even set up peer-assessment workshop activities.
And, we haven’t even got to the best part, Moodle is an open-source platform, which means that it’s completely free to download, install, host, modify, and use for your own site. However, there’s also an option to subscribe to MoodleCloud and pay to have everything stored online.
Edulastic
Edulastic is an amazing online assessment platform that gives teachers the opportunity to assess, instruct, and measure the progress of their students’ performance. The goal of the tool is to help teachers prepare students for standardized testing.
Here’s everything it covers:
- Diagnostic and formative assessments for identifying learning gaps;
- Differentiated assignments based on identified strengths and weaknesses to remediate, reinforce, or challenge their knowledge;
- Measure and track common benchmarks and previous performance to find the most effective assignments for increasing students’ scores;
- Extra security layers to ensure the assessments data is valid (example: browser lockdowns to dynamic passwords).
We love Edulastic because it’s one of the best online assessments tools that prepares students for the year-end standardized testing that awaits them all. They offer free and customizable questions from actual released standardized tests, such as PARCC, ISTEP, MCA, PSSA, MAAP, NC EOG, and others.
Another great thing about Edulastic is that it’s completely free to use. This includes:
- Unlimited assessments & students;
- 38,000+ question bank;
- 50+ technology-enhanced item types;
- Auto-graded questions;
- Google Classroom sync;
- Co-teacher access;
- Virtual lesson builder;
However, for $100 per year, you can get a lot of additional benefits and functionalities.
Edpuzzle
Edpuzzle is one of the most innovative online assessment platforms designed for video lectures, but it’s a lot more than just an assessment platform. It allows teachers to easily and very intuitively create interactive video lessons for students of all ages. Teachers can then directly embed these videos in their LMS platform, such as Moodle.
Within the videos, teachers can integrate questions for students to track whether they’re paying attention and understanding the content material. These answers can be closed (yes/no, multiple-choice questions, wiring missing words, etc.), open (writing their own responses), or can even involve drawing, embedding images, or uploading an audio response (to record audio as an answer).
This is an amazing way for teachers to break down long videos, engage students during video lectures, and assert the understanding of each student through the answers.
Edpuzzle’s basic version is completely free while the Pro Teacher version is only $12.50 per month and there’s also a possibility for a custom plan for schools and districts.
PollEverywhere
Poll Everywhere is a very simple, yet very useful online tool that offers exactly what their name says - the ability to embed polls everywhere. Whether we’re talking about live online classes, video lectures, LMS platforms, or other virtual environments, PollEverywhere is a great way to engage your audience and assess your work.
Thanks to PollEverywhere, teachers can add surveys, Q&As, quizzes, word clouds, and types of polls in their lectures. PollEverywhere for education offers two distinct plans - one for K-12 students and another for universities. This includes formative assignments, writing answers for an anonymous discussion, or engaging in animated word clouds or classroom voting for the youngest.
We love PollEverywhere because it’s a very simple product that allows teachers to write questions in real-time, collect responses from students in the moment, and then discuss the results during the lecture itself.
The pricing structure for PollEverywhere is very inclusive and flexible as there are five different plans - from a completely free version to a paid version for large teams that’s $84 per month. There’s also an Enterprise plan for organizations for which you can request an offer.
Slido
Slido is another product for engaging online audiences with live polls, quizzes, or Q&As. Their solution for education is used by Stanford University, Berkeley, UCL, and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Slido’s solution is trusted by some of the world’s best universities because of its easy and clean user interface as well as the useful features and functionalities it offers. With Silo teachers will get:
- Quick formative assessment activities;
- Real-time polls and quizzes;
- Anonymous or account-based question-asking functionality (gives students the ability to ask questions anonymously);
- Feedback collection;
- Crowdsourcing students’ questions during lectures;
- Integrations with other tools (example: Microsoft Teams; Google Slides; Power Point, etc).
Just as the tools we’ve already covered, Slido offers a completely free basic version for up to 100 participants, and three other paid plans of €10 (Engage), €50 (Professional), and €150 (Enterprise) per month.
EasyTestMaker
The name of this online assessment platform gives it all away. EasyTestMaker is a tool teachers can use to create, print, or publish online their tests easily!
We and many other teachers love EasyTestMaker because it cuts the manual labor significantly by automatically formatting and organizing the questions for the test. Plus, as opposed to some other similar tools, it allows teachers to either upload online or print the tests for offline use.
With the EasyTestMaker you can create different types of test questions, including multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer, and true or false questions with just a few clicks. You also have the option to create a bank of questions and give different users a random set of questions - this is extremely useful for tests that repeat each year as well as tests for different classes. Another similar functionality is alternative versions of the same test for preventing cheating.
Finally, EasyTestMaker also comes with a question analysis reporting feature that teachers can use to see how many test-takers answered, what’s the percentage of right and wrong answers for each question, and so on.
The pricing structure is composed of three plans - Free, Plus ($59.95/year), and Premium ($79.95/year).
Zoho Challenge
Zoho is a powerful suite of software for business management that provides many different solutions, including a complete CRM platform for which the company is most famous.
However, the Zoho Challenge is their product for education, and as a powerful online assessment platform, it allows educators to assess the knowledge of their learners through interactive quizzes.
In other words, Zoho Challenge is a quiz builder with many interesting functionalities. For instance, it allows teachers to create questions (or require responses) with images, audio, text, drawings, and so on. Each quiz you create is unique because there’s also a variety of assessment and question types (single choice, multiple-choice, fill the blank, notes, descriptive, etc). And, depending on the students’ answers, teachers can create customized feedback for each student.
For each quiz, teachers can also customize a variety of settings, such as choosing to set a passing score, allowed attempts, quiz time, randomized order, correct answer reveal, or un/restricted navigation.
There are three pricing plans for Zoho Challenge - Free, Express (€1 per user per month), and Professional (€3 per user per month).
ASSISTments (math platform)
ASSISTments might not be for all, but it’s an absolute must-have for math teachers. The platform is a completely free educational tool developed by educators, learning scientists, and software engineers. Their goal is to improve students’ learning experiences online through interactive technology.
Because of this, they offer high-quality learning resources, formative assessment features, and practice state tests, all for free.
All you need to do is make an account to explore the massive content library for students of all ages. And, when you find assignments that work for your students, you can filter them by class, status, due date, or release date. This makes it very easy for teachers to organize and track everything.
Kahoot!
Kahoot is one of the most fun, speed-based online assessment tools for students of all ages. Schools and even universities use it to gamify the learning process and make long lectures a lot easier to handle.
But, that’s not all Kahoot is used for. Teachers can create “kahoots” or quizzes to review students' knowledge either for formative assessment, or simply as a fun revision method before each class.
We love Kahoot because, besides its game-like design, it’s applicable to any subject, any topic, in any language, and on any device. Teachers and students have the absolute freedom to create some awesome learning quizzes that won’t feel like formal assessments at all. This works extremely well for students who suffer from performance anxiety and are very stressed during the exam period.
Kahoot can be used for free, but with some limitations like allowing 50 students per quiz. However, there are also three paid plans for individuals - Pro (€3 per teacher per month), Premium (€6 per teacher per month), and Premium Plus (€9 per teacher per month) - and one customizable plan for schools and districts.
Explain Everything
Explain Everything is a digital whiteboard where teachers can draw, add animated elements, and develop a fun and visual tutorial for their lectures to make sure everyone understands everything. Moreover, Explain Everything gives teachers the possibility to truly take their lectures to a whole other level by assigning activities and tasks within their presentations.
Explain Everything is one of the most unique tools for online learning, which is why we absolutely love it, but when talking about online assessment platforms, it shines with their features for formative assessment.
This means that students can create and share their whiteboards, too, as a response to an assignment, individually or as a collaborative group project. Teachers can visually see how students think and how they perceive the topic, and give unique feedback through the whiteboard as well.
Another benefit is that Explain Everything fully integrates with some of the most popular LMS platforms, such as Moodle, Google Classroom, Canvas, and others.
The pricing structure is similar to most learning platforms. It offers a limited free version, and two other plans with a lot more features and functionalities - Teacher (€34.99 per user, per year) and School (€150 one teacher, +30 students).
Gimkit
Teachers who are familiar with and believe in the gamification theory for education will absolutely love Gimkit - a learning platform that can be cheekily described as Kahoot on steroids.
In fact, the Gimkit team describes their platform as a game show for the classroom, which was designed by a high-school student who wanted a solution to keep them engaged in school.
However, unlike Kahoot, Gimkit users can answer questions on their own devices at their own pace without a time restriction for answers. All the questions are part of a “Kit” on a specific topic and the platform randomizes the order and frequency, allowing students to be exposed to one question more than once. This is a good way to add repetition for knowledge consolidation.
Probably the most interesting thing about Gimkit is that students can receive in-app “cash” (points) that they can use to purchase upgrades and power-ups, while wrong answers take away cashpoints.
Teachers can also assign GimKit as homework because some of the game mods and assignments can be graded automatically and produce a report for every student.
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is another learning platform from the future. With a very simple design and a goal to promote social learning, Flipgrid gives students an opportunity to express their creativity and share video responses to assignments or questions.
Teachers can create video lectures (video assignments) or share text assignments and ask for video responses. Students will then be expected to record themselves or create a video tutorial with their own audio as an answer. In fact, there are no limits as to how students respond as long as it is in a video format.
We love the focus on videos because of two things. First, it’s the closest thing to an in-person class because the teachers can see the students’ body language, their expressions, their hesitation, whether they’re comfortable, and so on. Second, it prevents cheating because students will have to record themselves answering.
On top of all that, Flipgrid is completely free and unlimited for all teachers and students!
Google Classroom Question Tool (and Google Forms)
Google Classroom is another widely popular LMS (learning management system) for educational institutions that follow a blended learning methodology. And, since it’s free and developed by Google, it’s not a surprise that most educational institutions are using it.
And, while there are incredibly advanced features for online assessments in Google Classrooms, such as the plagiarism reports, let’s focus on the Question Tool.
The Question Tool in Google Classroom is a simple, yet very helpful tool for online assessments. Teachers can create questions and assignments for a quick formative assessment or to get feedback from students.
The answers are in a form-like style and there’s an option for students to see and reply to each other's responses (or not).
Therefore, if you’re using Google Classroom or thinking of using it, the Question Tool, as well as Google Forms are great options for online assessment.
Mentimeter
Mentimeter is a Swedish company that has developed an online tool for creating presentations with real-time feedback. In other words, they believed in making presentations as assessment tools for education, businesses, or other private events.
Their solution for education offers teachers the possibility to test students’ knowledge, start discussions, and gather valuable feedback on a specific topic.
When teachers create presentations, they can use live-polling or survey features that students can gain access to through the Mentimeter app. There’s also the possibility of creating quiz competitions with colorful animations and a suspense-building leaderboard.
Best of all, teachers won’t have to go through the trouble of creating a fun and engaging presentation from scratch as Mentrimeter has an elaborate template library for different topics as well as many for formative assessment assignments.
Following the example of its competitors, Mentimeter offers a free version of the app with limited features, and three other pricing plans for those who really enjoy it - Basic ($11.99/month), Pro ($24.99/month), and Enterprise (custom price per request).
Crowdsignal
Crowdsignal is another survey app that can be used by teachers as a valuable online assessment tool. It’s just like Google Forms, but offers a lot more.
Crowdsignal is a surprisingly powerful tool that allows users to collect and export data everywhere, including in emails and other LMSs (learning management systems).
Here are some of the features that set Crowdsignal apart from its competition:
- Fast and very intuitive editing (no need for coding);
- Extremely versatile - supports surveys, forms, quizzes, and polls and 41 different question and form types (multiple-choice, free type, and Likert scales, etc.);
- Custom styles to match the theme of your lectures;
- Sharing possibilities - you can embed the form everywhere, such as your website, email, LMSs, in Zoom meetings, and more;
- Deep data analysis - you can see the results in real-time, but also create filters for data analysis and see it through beautiful visualizations.
- Versatile export options - you can export your data in any format (excel, pdf, etc).
All of this is available for free in a limited format. Then, depending on your needs, you choose between three pricing plans - Premium ($15 per month), Business ($45 per month), and Team ($29 per user per month).
Quizlet
Students regularly use flashcards when they’re learning because they’re a quick, fun, and effective self-assessment tool. And with Quizlet, teachers can also use the same method to assess students' knowledge. Here’s how it works.
As an online assessment platform, Quizlet uses flashcards and an AI Learning Assistant to help students get a grip of their most challenging subjects. Teachers can create a set of flashcards, folders with different flashcards, or a class with many subject topics and different sets of cards. Then, they can share their cards with the class and track how much students understand the material.
And while Quizlet is still an amazing tool for self-assessment, Quizlet Pro (€31.99/year) for teachers comes with many added features and functionalities. Some of these features include:
- Creating custom flashcards with the option to ask multiple-choice or open questions;
- Tracking students performance through Quizlet analytics;
- Using Quizlet Live for a quick assessment during the lecture;
- Creating detailed diagrams and other drawings on the flashcards to better explain the material;
- Using expert explanations from 10,000 certified textbooks as a way to decrease your workload.
Pear Deck
Pear Deck is an add-on and a web-based application designed to make Google Slides (Presentations) a lot more engaging by adding formative assessments and interactive questions.
The platform is very similar to Mentimeter, but its focus is more narrow - it’s meant for Google Slides and works perfectly for it. Therefore, if you’re using Google Slides to create presentations, you don’t have to buy separate applications of software, you can just integrate Pear Deck into Google’s workspace.
To use it, you only have to click on Add-ons on the upper toolbar while in Google Sliders and select “Open Pear Deck Sidebar”... that’s it. On the side, you’ll see all the functionalities and features this add-on offers.
More specifically, you’ll be able to drag and drop formative assessments with just one click, thanks to their template library. Think of bell ringers, checks for understanding, exit tickets, and more. However, you can also create your own custom questions. Some of the responses that Pear Deck support include: text, number response, multiple-choice, web slide, and drawing or dragging in the upgraded version.
The upgraded version of Peak Deck costs $149.99/yr, while the basic plan is completely free. You also have the option for an Enterprise plan tailored for your school or district for a custom price.
Seesaw
Similar to Moodle, Seesaw is a learning platform that connects teachers, students, and parents together.
It works in a very unique way by allowing students to create a digital portfolio of their work. For example, all the assignments, questions, tests, videos, drawings, recordings, and other work the students do is saved in their digital portfolio that teachers and parents have access to.
Moreover, teachers can gain valuable insights through all the stages of the students’ learning journey and see how they progress.
As you can see, Seesaw is, in a way, an educational social platform or an educational community to which only parents, students, and teachers have access.
Depending on which product you choose (example: Seesaw for schools or Seesaw for training), there are different prices. You can check their full pricing structure here.
Discovery Education
Discovery Education is yet another powerful learning platform for science, social studies, STEM, and coding, that also offers a lot of formative assessment tools.
With Discovery Education, teachers can engage all students through breath-taking content curated by virtual field trips made by professionals. It features videos, text, podcasts, interactives, and behind-the-scenes at major organizations, career spotlights, and more.
And, when it comes to formative assessments, teachers can create interactive quizzes inside the lectures or as a separate assignment and track each student’s progress. Discovery Education already has ready-to-use activities for all of their lectures, but teachers can customize everything and add their own touch if they like.
Discovery Education also gives teachers access to their large network of professionals and educators worldwide.
Some of the lectures on Discovery Educations are free for students, but to get most of their assessment features, you have to be subject to their school pricing plans - Elementary & Middle School ($2,600 per school per year) or High School ($3,100 per school per year).
Zoom
Last but not least, let’s talk about Zoom.
Zoom is not an online assessment tool, but it has become the staple of online classrooms, meetings, lectures, and more. Teachers all around the world gather students and organize their classes via Zoom. Therefore, one might wonder, “Can we also use Zoom to assess students’ knowledge?”
In a very limited form, yes we can. Zoom supports file sharing and screen sharing - two features that are usually used for monitoring students while they complete their exams online.
For instance, teachers can share the test through Zoom or share a link to a software, while all students must share their screen and leave their mic on. It’s not a perfect solution, but surprisingly it works very well and teachers love it because they’re already comfortable with Zoom.
Therefore, if you have limited resources or can't use other online assessment tools for any reason, you can still get a lot out of Zoom and provide a somewhat smooth testing experience.
And, let’s not forget that Zoom also gives teachers the ability to create polls for gathering quick feedback during lessons. Check out the following video on how to use Zoom for conducting formative assessments in an e-classroom.
How to Use Zoom Polls for Formative Assessment in the E-Classroom
Conclusion
Teaching online has its challenges no doubt, but with the right online assessment platforms and other digital tools, the whole process can be a lot easier than it seems. The only thing is that it might take a little time for everyone to get familiar with the tools and become comfortable using them. Other than that, the use of digital tools for assessments in education is a true game-changer that significantly decreases teachers’ workload.
Most of the online assessment tools in this list are incredibly popular and easy, which makes the learning curve less steep. On top of that, children nowadays grow up with technology in their hands, so chances are they’ll find the tools incredibly intuitive and comfortable.
Since all of the tools offer free trials or have free versions, you can easily try them out before choosing the one(s) that suit(s) you best.
At Inspired Instruction, we work hard to empower the teaching community and provide educators with valuable resources, tools, and techniques. This is why we regularly update our blog with new content on trending topics within the industry. So, if you liked this guide, check out our blog and subscribe to get the newest information.
