Moving From Measuring Percentages to Measuring Proficiency in Language Learning

Located in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Atlantic Canada Language Academy (ACLA) has been a dedicated destination for language learning since its founding in 2010. Operating legally under its original name, New Voice Languages and Tutoring, the Academy underwent a major transition in March 2020 when it was acquired by its current leadership just one week before global pandemic shutdowns. This pivot accelerated a shift to online offerings, and today, the school operates as a diversified institution where over 50% of its programs are delivered digitally to learners in many different countries.

Annually, ACLA serves approximately 120 students, maintaining an active baseline of around 70 concurrent learners supported by a dedicated staff of 20 educators. The academy’s core offerings center around its General English curriculum and its specialized Pathway program, which allows students to study English for academic purposes. Instead of requiring standard language entrance exams like the IELTS test, partner colleges and universities accept ACLA's portfolio-based language credentials as direct proof of academic readiness. Additionally, the school provides English for Specific Purposes (ESP), targeting high-demand job sectors across Canada, including healthcare, manufacturing, tourism, and construction.

Breaking away from rigid grades and manual spreadsheet silos

For Melanie Goode, Academic Director at ACLA, the primary administrative hurdle was the mismatch between traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) and the requirements of language acquisition. Standard educational platforms are built almost exclusively around percentages and grades, term-based structures, and weighted assignments. However, language tracking across Canada relies on the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB), a task-based evaluation system where failure doesn’t exist–only varying levels of achieved proficiency. Because no existing platform fit this task-oriented model, the academy was forced to track student portfolios using complex, heavily formula-based spreadsheets and private SharePoint folders.

This manual system was incredibly labor-intensive and created bottlenecks. Setting up a single student required building individual tracking sheets, establishing accurate back-end formulas, and configuring separate storage directories. The breaking point occurred during an industry conference in Vancouver, where Melanie had to leave a gala event for two hours just to configure the systems for three incoming students. Not to mention, managing raw SharePoint access introduced data integrity risks, as a single accidental press of a button by a user could wipe out months of cumulative tracking formulas. ACLA needed an intuitive digital space where students could upload their own artifacts, see their feedback and progress in real time, and interact without technical friction.

Aligning proficiency benchmarks with real-world scenarios and media-rich portfolios

The trajectory changed when Melanie witnessed a five-minute SpacesEDU presentation at a conference and immediately recognized its potential as the school’s digital portfolio home. Driven by an urgent need to onboard a large new student contract, ACLA implemented the platform district-wide in a three-week window. To capture student growth within the unique 3-stage, 12-level architecture of the Canadian Language Benchmarks, the academy created a custom 4-point scale in SpacesEDU to assess students from emerging, developing, competent, to proficient. With this scale, clearly connected to reading, writing, speaking, and listening tasks using SpacesEDU’s Curriculum Tags, progress was clear to learners and educators.

“I spent two years researching and demoing traditional LMS platforms, but they all depended on percentage grades and weighted averages. The moment I saw SpacesEDU, I knew it perfectly mirrored the task-based nature of language benchmarks.” - Melanie Goode

A massive advantage of the solution was its capacity to reduce technical barriers for a vulnerable student demographic. Many of the academy's learners are immigrants and refugees who enter the program with minimal computer skills. Because SpacesEDU operates with a familiar, modern social-media feel and functions seamlessly as a smartphone application, students can upload their work without struggling to navigate complex software.

“When you get certain students on a laptop or desktop, they are completely lost. Having a mobile platform that looks like social media reduces all those barriers. They know how to use their phone to record audio, take photos, and instantly submit evidence of their capabilities.” - Melanie Goode

This multimodal flexibility allowed teachers to build a much broader picture of student growth, especially through voice recordings and video tools that capture true verbal pronunciation far better than traditional text-based platforms. Teachers, too, can provide media-rich feedback in the form of videos or voice recordings, in addition to annotation tools, to best support their students’ language development.

Beyond day-to-day engagement, Melanie describes the Reporting Space as the backbone of their monthly student progress tracking. Each reporting cycle gives learners a comprehensive, visual look at their growth, including a monthly summary overview of:

• Their learning and current overall Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) level
• A specific skills breakdown across speaking, reading, writing, listening, and language resources like grammar and vocabulary

This detailed documentation also streamlines stakeholder reporting, allowing the academy to easily download and share progress reports with the employers funding their students' English programs. Plus, the Reporting Space creates built-in accountability. For government-sponsored or remote students with irregular attendance, it serves as objective evidence of their participation. If a student ever disputes their progress, educators can pull up a clear record showing their completion history, self-reported language levels, and completed tasks, making it easy to counter or agree with those claims and clearly outline the required next steps.

Boosting homework completion and building teacher momentum

The migration to digital portfolios completely transformed student accountability and engagement across both online and in-person classrooms. Historically, students would close their laptops at the end of a session and fail to engage with homework materials. By making the process mobile-accessible, homework completion rates went up. Students have taken total ownership of their portfolios, frequently uploading personal videos outside of class hours, such as documenting themselves cooking and explaining the process entirely in English, just to share their proud moments with their educators.

“At graduation, our students explicitly shared how much they loved using the platform. Even in larger classes where one-on-one time during the live session is limited, the targeted, instant feedback loop within SpacesEDU ensured that no student ever felt unseen.” - Melanie Goode

The platform has also fostered an incredibly positive professional culture among the teaching faculty. Moving away from tedious spreadsheets eliminated teacher frustration, and monthly usage metrics have even sparked an organic, friendly competition among the staff. When it was revealed that an ACLA educator, Lizette, ranked among the top 200 most engaged teachers across Canada on the platform, it motivated the entire team to dive deeper into the platform.

“Our teachers used to find the old spreadsheet systems incredibly confusing. Onboarding to this platform eliminated hours of back-and-forth alignment. Now, if I need to evaluate where an individual student stands, I don’t have to call an emergency meeting–I just check their active Reporting Space.” - Melanie Goode

Looking ahead to the next one to three years, ACLA is set to use the platform as the foundational anchor for its global expansion. The district has already launched a virtual pilot project with public school students in Japan, using the platform to facilitate out-of-class assignments and asynchronous engagement. Plus, the Academy is debuting a specialized teacher-training curriculum called the Maximizing English Teaching course, which will utilize the platform to teach the next generation of educators how to run successful portfolio-based language assessments.

By moving past manual workflows and leaning into student-driven documentation, ACLA has created a sustainable framework for global literacy. As Melanie summarizes: "If you are following a task-based learning model, adopt SpacesEDU, just do it. You won't regret it.”