Scorion is the creator and developer of the digital portfolio platform Scorion and the survey tool Easion. Our mission? Improving education by providing more insight, both for learners and tutors. With over 15 years of experience, we are pioneers in measuring and making development visible. Scorion is now the most widely used portfolio in medical and paramedical education.
At Scorion, education and innovation are at the core of our company culture. Our goal is to make a positive impact both in terms of quality and quantity. Recently, we received encouraging feedback from a dentistry educator who noticed that his students are becoming more competent doctors through the use of Scorion. Another educator shared that they’ve successfully achieved their teaching goals with Scorion. We highly value this feedback and ambitiously aim to provide a “better” education to as many (future) professionals as possible using Scorion in the coming years. Our main focus is making a positive and lasting contribution through improved education.
Scorion stands for high-quality, flexible, and personalized education based on transparent decisions and feedback. This guiding principle is now supported in Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States. Scorion is therefore also used in all these countries. In the Netherlands, Scorion is the market leader in medical and health-related programs but is also used in non-medical programs. Furthermore, we focus on the continuous development of Scorion, placing particular emphasis on accessibility, security, and user-friendliness. Our goal is to achieve a positive impact through the use of Scorion, valuing ambitions in sustainability and diversity as integral parts of our organization.
Perhaps it’s the unique blend of software developers and educators that makes Scorion stand out. While we specialize in software development, we’re far from just another IT company. Education is our passion, especially when it comes to innovating within it. And the groundwork for this was laid years ago.
Before then, a portfolio was typically a collection of documents showcasing a student’s work. However, in professions where precision is important (such as medicine), this traditional portfolio model fell short. There arose a pressing need for a portfolio capable of capturing daily work and learning moments.
A significant amount of time, resources, and effort has been invested in IT in education worldwide in recent years. However, one might question whether these investments have resulted in substantial improvements. Around the same time as we recognized a gap in education, Prof. Dr. Cees van der Vleuten initiated pioneering research at Maastricht University Medical Center on Programmatic Assessment in medical education. The concept of using data points to capture a continuous stream of feedback and decision moments aligned perfectly with Scorion’s vision.
Similarly, Prof. Dr. Olle ten Cate embarked on research to enhance the content of medical education. He developed a groundbreaking framework centered on the Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA), forming the basis of a novel method for informed decision-making, particularly within medical professionals or learners. Scorion emerged as an ideal platform to support curriculum and teaching with this concept.
Scorion’s exceptional flexibility enables it to accommodate various educational approaches seamlessly. Whether working with competencies, EPAs, or adopting programmatic assessment, Scorion adapts effortlessly. Moreover, Scorion supports a diverse range of feedback and assessment formats, including 360-degree feedback, self-reflection, and group-oriented processes such as station tests or OSCE.
Unlike traditional portfolios, Scorion prioritizes the individual learning journey. Recognizing that each learner progresses at their own pace, Scorion allows for personalized programs, particularly beneficial for courses emphasizing practice or workplace learning.
Flexibility extends to the feedback process, especially pertinent when learners undertake internships across multiple organizations. Scorion offers ingenious solutions, such as QR code-enabled feedback submission and “push” feedback, streamlining the feedback collection process without burdening supervisors with administrative tasks.
With our sophisticated role and rights system, we ensure that all functions can be customized at an individual level. This allows you to easily manage access to different parts of the portfolio for specific users.
These innovative solutions, along with the expertise of our experienced consultants and specialists, contribute to making Scorion stand out not only as a product but also in terms of its usability and support.
It all began under the motto: “If you can dream it, you can create it.”
In 1999, when the internet was starting to grow, Roel Smabers and Roelf Sluman started our company, which was then called Parantion. This was just before the first internet bubble. Roelf was a writer and internet expert. Roel was a planner with a strong interest in human development. They both loved innovation and saw new and real chances on the internet that had never existed before.
Facts:
Number of users: 0
Number of institutions: 0
The 'bubble' had a big impact on this young start-up. Between 2003 and 2004, the internet lost some of its shine. But even during this difficult time, Parantion kept going. They believed strongly in their mission: using data to understand behavior and support personal development.
The first idea was to build an HR portal where employees could manage everything themselves. And that was at a time when the internet was mostly just a collection of static web pages. Parantion started working on one of the first real web applications.
Most software at that time came on CD-ROMs. You would put them into a disk drive, and your WordPerfect disk would start spinning. When we showed the first version of our online survey tool, many people could not believe it was possible. You could create a questionnaire online, send it to a group of people, and get answers right away.
The first version was called EDS (emension dynamic survey). Soon, it was renamed to Parantion Web Survey (PWS). The final version, PWS 6.1, was turned off in 2024. Its follow-up, Easion Survey, is still running. It will eventually become part of Scorion as a panel-style evaluation tool, probably sometime in 2027.
Big organizations used PWS and Easion. It was safe, easy to use, and fully developed in the Netherlands. In 2005, the company started to grow. From that point on, a few new team members joined each year.
Around that time, other companies also started offering survey tools. But it was unclear what happened with the data. That is why many cities, health insurers, hospitals, and other large organizations chose to use PWS.
In 2006, Bas Aalpoel and Robert Smeenk joined Parantion. Bas, as the new managing director, brought a safe and innovative infrastructure. Robert added a strong educational vision. Together with Roel, they built the foundation for the Scorion portfolio platform.
At that time, the ideas of ed-tech and programmatic assessment were still unknown. But in 2006, the development of Scorion started. Today, it has become a leading portfolio platform for educational institutions and companies.
In 2009, TU Delft asked if we could rebuild a peer-review tool they had created themselves using Scorion. With some changes, it was possible. The platform started to grow. More and more assessment-like processes in real work situations could now be supported.
At TU Delft, the problem was that project teams were working more and more outside the view of the teachers. Still, they wanted to understand how students were developing. That is why they needed the peer-review tool.
Around the same time, we visited several universities of applied sciences with Scorion. We showed that we had created an assessment platform where you could easily see how a student was developing. Both students and their supervisors could use it. We had the technical knowledge from our survey tool to build questionnaires, and the educational knowledge to not treat them as just surveys, but to connect them to a portfolio.
So instead of only storing documents or final grades in a portfolio, we could also save and show data from completed assessment forms on a dashboard. That was the heart of Scorion.
Most universities we showed it to were not interested. They thought it was too much work. And it meant they had to think carefully about their curriculum first.
But the Scorion team kept going. We knew it was a good idea. Luckily, we got in touch with a medical education program at a university. And it turned out there was a name for what we were doing: programmatic assessment. The continuous capture of valuable learning moments.
Isala Hospital in Zwolle asked if they could use it together with the UMCG in Groningen. They were already using our survey tools, but now they were wondering: could the paper internship booklets in medical education also be made digital?
After Isala and UMCG, the general practitioner (GP) training program joined. They also wanted a way to track the progress of doctors in specialist training. One challenge was that this GP program was offered at seven different universities, each with small differences in their training plans. But Scorion could handle that too.
Then more medical programs followed. From Radboud University (Radboud UMC) to Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, and from UMC Utrecht to Amsterdam UMC. Most medical programs discovered the power of Scorion.
Of course, there was still room for improvement. Processes could be more efficient, and the user interface could be more user-friendly. But this did not change the huge flexibility of Scorion to store every medical activity as a data point. And to support every kind of curriculum, whether it used EPAs, competencies, learning outcomes or qualifications. With Scorion, almost anything is possible.
And then, the first international universities joined. We even made a Chinese version of Scorion. In Sydney, Australia, and also for GPs in South Africa and in Germany, interest in Scorion began to grow.
Scorion has become an important player and market leader in the field of digital (development) portfolios in medical education in the Netherlands. Almost all medicine and dentistry programs now use Scorion. Many other (para)medical programs like physiotherapy, midwifery or occupational therapy also use it.
Scorion has also proven its value outside of medical education. In practice-based programs such as teacher training (PABOs), technical universities and IT programs, Scorion is used successfully as well.
For the past few years, Scorion has also been used internationally, especially in Germany, South Africa and the United States. This growth has allowed us to support educational institutions around the world with different holistic forms of education.
Our company name has been changed to Scorion, in line with our flagship product. Today, about 30 smart and independent colleagues work at Scorion.
The passion for human development, innovation and technology, and the use of knowledge as a basis for decision-making are still part of the company’s DNA.
