Gateway College in Sri Lanka uses Dugga as its assessment platform, with student identities administered in Microsoft Teams and Dugga

Gateway College in Sri Lanka is a network of five international schools. Gateway is known for its state-of-the-art campuses, high-quality teaching, and a program of learning benchmarked against a range of world-class, internationally recognized qualifications from the UK and Australia. The school is therefore known as one of Sri Lanka's premium educational institutions. Gateway College welcomes pupils from two and a half to 18 years of age. During COVID, the management of the school quickly had to switch from traditional on-site teaching to hybrid learning.

Below, Surani Maithripala, Team Leader, Change Management at Gateway, shares what she learned from this transition.

With school lockdowns in Sri Lanka at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, we had to look for solutions that would allow us to conduct safe and secure online exams, and that was when Dugga came in as a solution. The transition went quite smoothly from a technical perspective because, being a Microsoft Showcase School, both our students and teachers were already using Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 applications for homework and smaller assignments and assessments.

• Dugga's greater variety of question types and the application's ability to be integrated into the Microsoft Teams app helped a lot when we set off to create new routines for digital distribution and correction of more complex exams.
• Exams now get distributed digitally to pupils from third grade upwards in the form of events in their individual calendars in Microsoft Teams.

Surani, who is involved in training the teachers of Gateway on how to use the platform, says that the wiki available in the application made it easier for her to master the platform in a very short time.

STEM plug-ins in Dugga

The integration of GeoGebra and Chemistry question types made it possible for Gateway teachers to set up complex papers for O-Level and A-Level students. Mastering these question types required some training for both teachers and students. During this process, Gateway College found Dugga's support team to be of great help.

• I have been in contact with both Gunnar and Mats at Dugga's support, says Surani.

Demo sessions with Dugga

• After Mats Lövgren at Dugga support had instructed me for the first time, continues Surani, I felt confident to set up individual training sessions in Dugga with my colleagues. All this happened during the COVID lockdown.
• Gateway is a group of five international schools, and in total we have around 500 teachers and 5,000 students! Here in Sri Lanka we must always be prepared, especially in the current context. Since we managed the COVID crisis quite well from a pedagogical point of view, using digital tools such as Dugga, we are now careful not to lose the knowledge of hybrid learning that we gained during the pandemic, since we are uncertain of the future challenges that we, as a group of schools, may face.

Teachers exploring Dugga

• Our teachers have been super-creative in their own ways of exploring Dugga, and that mindset is something we encourage. Teachers have used film clips and different question types innovatively to get the most out of testing, also from the perspective of seeing assessment as a way of learning.