Khulisa will use ZipGrade on an assignment which calls for assessing over a thousand teachers.
Until 2011, we used an expensive OCR/form creation software called TELEform for our survey and questionnaire work. We printed thousands of pages of forms, had fieldworkers administer them at more than 2000 schools, and then fed them through a high-speed scanner, before pushing batches of images through the OCR software. We then hired “verifiers” to check fields that the software could not accurately scan and capture. At the time, this was cutting edge technology that gave us a competitive advantage for our work.
Khulisa then shifted to online capturing, using open source apps such as Open Data Kit (ODK) on Android devices and JotForm to create fillable PDFs for PCs. However, there are still activities where paper is required, such as when testing individuals. ZipGrade is an Android/iOS app that allows you to use your smart device as an optical grading machine.