On 12 May 2020, Chairperson of Board of Directors Maleyka Abbaszade has received Victoria Clark - Assessment Solutions Manager, Global Assessments at British Council, Summer Xia - British Council Country Director in Azerbaijan, and Nargiz Akbarova - Exams Lead South Caucasus in a video format.
During the online meeting, joint partnership initiatives, innovative approaches in the field of language assessment, challenges in their application, and the ways to address these challenges were discussed. Both sides agreed to continue working together for the institutional capacity building projects and development of new products for the regional market.
The British Council Global Assessment Team is currently piloting a new online training program for the English language assessment experts in partnership with the SEC’s team of experts in language assessment. The main purpose of SEC’s involvement in this collaboration is both to support the institutional development of the SEC’s team in language assessment and to contribute to the international project as a partner organization. The three-stage and six-week training program is in progress, and five weeks of which have been successfully completed. Currently, the improvement of training platform is being carried out following the mutual discussions.
Further steps to be taken in accordance with the training feedback was one of the main discussion points of the videoconference. The next steps are the following:
- to continue the professional development of distinguished training participants with an advanced level training and contribute to the quality assurance reviews of SEC’s English language assessments;
- to offer the piloted training program for the broader audience of young English language teachers interested in assessment;
- to jointly develop a certification program of online assessments for the regional market;
- to organize a regional conference dedicated to online testing.
It is important to mention that the partnership between the British Council and the State Examination Center started from September 23, 2016 with signing of a Letter of Intent to promote joint projects in the field of language assessment and education.
It should also be highlighted that the British Council was one of the keynote sponsors of the 45th International Association for Educational Assessment Annual Conference held by the SEC on 22-27 September 2019. The theme of the conference was Assessment and Decision-Making: Individual and Institutional solutions.