By MZD
June 18, 2021 | Press Releases

MZD Continues to Grow, Meet our Newest Team Members

 

MZD Team Grows
In Support of Its Mission as a
World Class, End-to-End Assessment Platform

 

Innovative assessment technology company adds a Director of Customer Success, Chief Architect, and Technology Product Manager to expand its suite of performance assessment
products that provide the ability to author, deliver, and score any media type from any
location

June 18, 2021 — NORTH LIBERTY, IA— MZD , an education technology company providing performance assessment solutions to organizations globally, announced that it has added three new team members to capitalize on growth opportunities presented by the changing education and assessment landscape.

Bob Wolf has joined MZD as the Director of Customer Success. Bob has a proven track record in developing and delivering technical content for both publication and training with 25+ years of experience. Skilled in communication with clients, and bridging technical gaps between developers and end-users, Bob demonstrates excellent people skills with a focus on software support and training.

Mike Powell has joined MZD as its Chief Architect. With more than 20 years of software development experience and 15 years of experience in Education, Mike possesses a unique balance of technology and education expertise. He has served as lead architect for two national consortia, led teams that created and serviced state-of-the-art large-scale assessment solutions, and has been closely involved in the standards community. Mike’s expertise in computer-adaptive testing, artificial intelligence scoring, enterprise architecture, scaling and capacity planning, and human-computer interaction is a huge asset to MZD.

Tyson Watkins has also joined MZD as a Technology Product Manager focused on scoring. Tyson has worked with MZD from the client side of the OSCAR scoring platform since 2015 in his role as a project manager with the University of Georgia’s Georgia Center for Assessment. There he led numerous assessment projects in both the formative and summative environments to provide a wide range of scoring services to clients in the education industry for over 16 years.

“We are very excited to have Bob, Mike, and Tyson joining us at MZD. We continue to see our customer reach and industry impact expand, and with the new team members, we will only accelerate that growth. Bob’s focus on our clients’ success will continue to ensure a world-class customer experience; Tyson’s expansive background in scoring high-stakes and formative assessments will enhance our already best-in-class platform; and Mike’s deep technical knowledge and previous successes in building out educational platforms truly strengthen our engineering team. We are very excited about what’s next for MZD and our role in the future of Assessment.” – Zac Henrich, CEO

MZD provides a suite of assessment technology solutions for testing organizations and school districts around the world. These solutions help deliver faster and higher quality assessments of student performance, in turn helping to improve student achievement.

ADAM™ is an intuitive assessment authoring, delivery and reporting platform that integrates
with OSCAR and OSCAR Classroom to provide clients with a comprehensive assessment
solution. ADAM has been adopted by state and district clients including the Louisiana Department of Education in support of their Innovative Assessment program.

OSCAR™ is an online distributed performance scoring platform designed to streamline scoring activities for constructed response, video, audio, and portfolio work. OSCAR has been adopted by clients including Gwinnett County Public Schools (Atlanta), Millard Public Schools (Omaha),
Georgia Center for Assessment (Athens), and PSI (United Kingdom).

EMMA™ is a next-generation solution for scoring innovation built for Essay Machine Marking Automation. EMMA was engineered by MZD as an AI platform using state-of-the-art natural language processing models incorporating modern machine learning techniques and deeply bidirectional, unsupervised language representation. EMMA provides best-in-class data models with scalable automation that eliminate the friction users experience with other existing automated scoring solutions.

OSCAR Classroom, is a collaborative performance assessment management, scoring, and
reporting platform. Among its clients are the Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC) to support the Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment Project (MAEIA), and the Colorado Department of Education to support collaborative standards-based performance assessments.

About MZD, Inc.

With a mission to enable more meaningful and actionable educational measurement, MZ Development, Inc. (MZD) is a testing technology innovation company focused on building better tools for assessment scoring, reporting, authoring, and delivery. MZD provides state departments of education, test publishers, school districts, and credentialing organizations with cutting-edge technology solutions that emphasize practical designs, enjoyable user experiences and richer results with greater efficiency. Founded in 2015, MZD has quickly established a strong reputation as a trusted technical partner building powerful tools that meet the unique needs of large-scale assessment programs and has aggregated the experience necessary to skillfully address evolving assessment technology requirements with practical, cost-effective solutions. Districts and organizations interested in MZD and its innovative assessment platforms can email contact@mzdevinc.com or call 319-855-7694.

 

Download press release announcing MZD’s recent growth.

 

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