Sharing Nicely

Steve Egan has set himself the task of blogging about some of the core issues in open education. This week he writes about assessment. Assessment is a huge issue in open education for (at least) three reasons:

1. The open model questions the role of the traditional “expert”, but it is that “expert” who is typically responsible for assessment in education. For informal learning communities to work peers must be able to assess each others’ work.
2. Secondly, while assessment and accreditation are two distinct issues, you need good assessment to enable reliable accreditation.
3. And finally, online social networking communities are pioneering new ways of assessing information, even though they don’t call it that, and it’s exciting to think about their application to education. Things like aggregating group opinions (digg.com, slashdot.org), peer review and discussion (amazon.com reviews), reputation networks that automatically filter content (topsy.com) are perfectly suitable for assessment purposes in learning. 

Steve asks for literature suggestions. Some of the things I have been reading recently, or return to regularly include:

• Philip Greenspun’s recent rant about the state of higher education in the US is enjoyable and raises some important questions. For one, he suggests cutting the link between teaching and assessment, and argues they should be done by separate people/institutions. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth
  
• Sir John Daniels (and co-authors) explore possibilities to increase access without jeopardising quality and argues that this separation would increase innovation and drives down cost. He writes in Change Magazine:
  

  “If the trend to delink testing from teaching continues, it will lead to more flexible and less expensive models of higher education, with the result that the aspiration of giving people access to high-quality higher education worldwide may not be an illusion.”

• Via the tomorrow’s professors mailing list from Stanford’s School of Education a short text by Bill Cerbin titled “Assessing How Students Learn” arrived timely this morning (It’s not on their website yet, but you’ll be able to find it here — search for article #956 — soon). While I suspect the author would take issue with the idea of separating teaching and assessment, it describes a fascinating study that investigated reasons for the disparity of Maths grades between African American students and others students. Performance was traced back to participation in informal study groups (or the lack of participation in such groups). It’s a brilliant response to those that still argue peer-learning or -assessment don’t work.
  

  “For example, Chinese students [who performed significantly better than African American students] formed study groups outside of class and devoted their time to the most difficult material rather than simply reviewing the mathematics they already knew. They compared solutions, tested one another, and talked through difficult concepts. The African American students also invested a lot of time studying calculus, but did it alone.”

• “Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind. Assessment for Learning, Assessment as Learning, Assessment of Learning” provides a comprehensive discussion of the different roles assessment can have in learning and teaching. It’s especially useful if you are approaching open education from a non-education perspective (for example as an open source software researcher) and helps you relate your experience to the education context. It’s available for download: http://www.wncp.ca/media/40539/rethink.pdf 
• And Stephen Downes “Open Source Assessment” article, continues to provide insightful reflection, even though it’s written  almost exactly 2 years ago. He analyses how an “open source” approach can be applied at different levels of the assessment process, including the assessment questions. He writes
  

  “The proposition here is that, if the assessment of learning becomes an open, and community, enterprise, rather than closed and proprietary, then the cost of assessment would be reduced and the quality (and fairness) of assessment would be increased, thus making credentialing accessible.”

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