Ludovic Charbonnel
Co-founder of Challenge Me
“ChallengeMe is much more than a suite of simple and intuitive online collaborative software.”
ChallengeMe is a software package that offers peer review, can you tell us more about it?
Ludovic Charbonnel: “ChallengeMe is indeed a peer learning and evaluation solution created in 2017 with my partner Alexandre Gasne. We first worked with major groups like Schneider Electric or the Seb Group, and for the past two years we have been developing a lot of features dedicated to the world of education. We mainly work with business schools, engineering schools, universities, preparatory schools, etc. And even high schools since the beginning of the year! The big advantages of our solution are the simplicity and flexibility to create effective peer-to-peer activities. Teachers can launch an activity in 2 minutes from a Moodle for example. They are guided to create a relevant and effective activity with the platform, but also with our team of coaches. This peer-to-peer pedagogy is full of benefits: more motivating, more engaging, more effective, and it leads to more sustainable learning!”
Which features are most appreciated by students?
Ludovic C.: “The first words that come to mind are often: intuitive, simplicity and above all the interest for them of peer to peer, meaning receiving qualitative and quantitative feedback on their work. It’s motivating, engaging and it allows them to progress quicker. They appreciate being able to work in groups in the platform, to evaluate other work or to evaluate people they have worked with. Peer evaluation develops skills that they will be able to use in the business world: collaboration, feedback, communication and critical thinking.
Let’s use the example of a teacher who is going to launch a group activity for his class in 3 minutes: he is going to ask them to work in teams on a video presentation, the groups of students will then have a few days to complete the work. Once their video is uploaded on ChallengeMe, they will be asked to evaluate each other. We can even imagine a double evaluation: the student evaluates individually the work of other groups, but also the members of his working group. Then the results are made available, the student can consult several feedbacks on his work (content, form, presentation…etc) and also on the way he worked with his team (usually soft skills evaluation).”
What is your vision of evolution for 2022?
Ludovic C.: “The start of the 2021 academic year marked an important step for ChallengeMe, as we increased the number of schools and teachers using the platform in higher education by a factor of 7. New peer-to-peer activities have been created through co-construction with schools, notably SKEMA, which has worked on very interesting peer-to-peer MCQ scenarios for the TAJ MAJ preparatory courses. We have also expanded our scope with general and technical high schools that have chosen ChallengeMe to implement this type of pedagogy. We can say that we have become the French reference for peer evaluation.
In 2022, we want to go even further. We have set up a collaboration with a research laboratory around peer-to-peer. We are looking at what can be done to support teachers and students in this type of activity to make them even more effective. We are also going to collaborate with schools and universities to develop new peer-to-peer pedagogical scenarios such as a peer-to-peer language tutoring system with the University of Lorraine. As I often say, we are at year 1 of digital peer-to-peer, everything remains to be done and we intend to accompany all our customers in this great educational opportunity!”
