ETS CEO, Amit Sevak on The Present and Future of Assessment

05/18/23 • 41 min

No Such Thing: Education in the Digital Age

As President and CEO of ETS, Amit Sevak leads the largest private educational assessment organization in the world, delivering products and services across 200 countries, serving tens of millions of people each year. Sevak has been a driving force in education, learning and workforce development around the globe. He has led the University of Europe in Madrid in Spain, INTI International University in Malaysia and Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC) in Mexico. His transformational style of leadership consistently led to innovation, better learning and improved job prospects for hundreds of thousands of students and workers. Sevak has long been a coach for edtech CEOs. He has served on numerous nonprofit boards, including Cambiar Education, CitiBridge and Education Design Lab. In 2017, he founded Mindset Global, an education investment firm. His early career included roles as a researcher, professor and advisor. Sevak graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Chicago and earned his master’s in business administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School. He is a regular speaker on the future of education and work, educational measurement and civic engagement. He is married with three kids and splits his time between Princeton, New Jersey and the Washington, D.C. area.

As the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, ETS builds assessments based on rigorous research and an uncompromising commitment to quality. Each year, the organization develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests in more than 180 countries at more than 9,000 locations. With a mission to advance quality and equity in education, ETS delivers groundbreaking research and learning solutions to help students, educators, schools, businesses and governments on their journey to what’s possible.

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Live from SXSW Edu 2023: Research Storytelling in The Digital Age

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop is an educator, researcher and youth advocate with two decades of instructional and administrative experience in public schools, universities and non-profit organizations across the United States. Bishop currently teaches on the faculty of the City University of New York and the University of San Francisco. She is Co-Founder of Global Turning Points, an international consulting collective based on the praxis of critical pedagogy. Bishop’s writing includes her 2015 “Becoming Activist: Critical Literacy and Youth Organizing” and her 2018 “Embodying Theory: Epistemology, Aesthetics and Resistance“ which she created in collaboration with artist Tamsen Wojtanowski. She has two new books expected out in 2022 and 2023. Dr. Bishop holds a Ph.D. in Education: Language, Literacy and Culture and has been featured in numerous articles on youth activism, civic engagement and voting including on Good Morning America, PBS NewsHour, Business Insider and PolitiFact. Find her online @DrBishopDigital.

An artist by training, Dr. Kylie Peppler is a professor of Informatics & Education at University of California, Irvine where she designs and studies creative educational technologies together with industry partners. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Schooling from UCLA, where she was part of the NSF-sponsored team that designed and studied the Scratch platform, which has grown to over 93 million users. Her research group, the Creativity Labs, is part of UCI’s Connected Learning Lab, which reaches over 8,000 newsletter subscribers and a website which averages over 11,500 views per month. Recent projects include partnerships with Merlyn Mind on the innovative uses of AI in classrooms, and the development of new XR solutions with Purdue University for the future manufacturing workforce. Her work has been consistently supported by a range of foundations, federal and industry partners, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, Google.org, US Department of Education, Boeing, Best Buy, Fossil Foundation, GAP Inc., and National Geographic.

Dr. Sangita Shresthova is a writer, researcher, thinker, speaker and doer. She is an expert in mixed research methods, online learning, media literacies, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is currently the Director of Research and Programs and Co-PI of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California, where her current work is focused on the civic imagination. Sangita is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in creative venues around the world including the Pasadena Dance Festival, Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and MSc. degrees from MIT and LSE. She received her BA from Princeton University.She is also a faculty member at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Social Change in Austria.

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You're Doing It Wrong

Dan Garcia (UC Berkeley MS 1995, PhD 2000) is a Teaching Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. Selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019, he has won all four of the department's computer science teaching awards, and holds the record for the highest teaching effectiveness ratings in the history of several of the department's courses.

He is a national leader in the "CSforALL" and "A's for All (as time and interest allow)" movements, bringing engaging computer science to students normally underrepresented in the field, and supporting them to achieve proficiency. Thanks to four National Science Foundation grants, the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" non-majors course he co-developed has been shared with over 1,000 high school teachers! He is delighted to regularly have more than 50% female enrollment in BJC, with a high mark of 63% in the Spring of 2018, shattering the record at UC Berkeley for an intro computing course, and is among the highest in the nation! He is humbled by the national exposure he and the course have received in the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, NPR's All Things Considered, USA Today, and the front pages of the San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle.