I don’t need a certificate to beat you in chess : Sharing Nicely

Just submitted my “Testing Our Assumptions” proposal for the upcoming Open Ed Conference (Oct 25-27 2011). I am interested in hacking certification – and was happy to accept David’s invitation to act as a Strand Champion for “Open credentialing, open competency certification, and open degrees” at the conference.

Rather than submit a more formal presentation or poster session, I thought I’d try to get some people to help me think through a fundamental question related to certification, “do we really need certification?” The format for “Testing Our Assumptions” is brilliant for these kinds of questions. And besides, traveling half-way around the world to give a presentation and speak at the smartest people in the open education space, rather than speaking with them, seems like a wasted opportunity.

Here is my proposal. Feedback welcome, and I hope to see you at the conference.

One of the most interesting topics in the open education movement focuses on certification and credentialing of learning achievements by participants in open learning environments. The underlying assumption is that we need some form of certification, to validate what we have learned. In this session, I would like to to suggest (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we can re-imagine learning as a process that is authentic, social, and open – we might not require a separate certification process. Achievements can be evident in the learning itself.

Does learning require certification?

Certification is a signal or currency, that lets us transfer achievements to those outside of our learning community. As a student, I don’t need grades to signal my skills to those I studied with – but to those who don’t know me, my abilities, or my achievements.

If I beat you in chess, you know that I can play

Jim Gee calls testing “primitive” and the result of poor learning design, and compares students to game players. There is no need for testing in games, because each stage of the game requires some form of mastery and achievement before the player can enter.

Does good learning create evidence, which can replace credentials?

If we follow Gee, we must ask if the problem with credentials is not rooted in the design of learning environments and experience. Can we borrow lessons from game design to make learning so authentic, engaging, and social that it produces all necessary evidence of achievements as a byproduct of the learning? (Or the other way around, does the learning become a byproduct of achievements?)

I should add that I am a terrible chess player – with or without a certificate.

http://manypossibilities.net Steve Song

This is such an important question. And one for which I feel intuitively there must be a better answer than what we have.

Your title “I don’t need a certificate to beat you in chess” has got me thinking. First it reminded me of stories (true or not) of people passing themselves off as doctors. In this scenario, a person may have some of the skills, may even be brilliant at some elements of medicine but may be critically lacking in other knowledge. The flip side of this is a certified Medical Doctor who hasn’t kept up to date for years with changes in medical practice and research.

Both scenarios are potentially dangerous to patients. So what criteria could you establish that would address both of the above kinds of danger. Perhaps community recognition would do it. Being recognised as an ongoing participant / learner / mentor within a community.

If community recognition is the key, how do you establish a mechanism for that recognition? Is “participation” a minimum requirement? Are we required to participate in order to be recognised?

And if that’s true, what kind of participation? And how do you prevent that metric from being gamed? Google’s pagerank and Ebay’s seller rating are proxies for relevance and trust. I wonder if there is a proxy for competence and knowledge.

Sorry, no answer yet. Thinking out loud.
Philipp

Steve – It is a real pleasure to have you thinking out loud here. Thanks for your comment.

I suspect you are right, that “community” is indeed the key element here. One question we have been asking ourselves regarding the “badges” we want to issue to users of the Mozilla/P2PU School of Webcraft is, “should badges be tied to participation (in a course)?” Tying them to a course, or other form of participation in the community, reduces the potential for the system to scale – but greatly improves our ability to say meaningful things about users’ skills and competencies, and reduces the opportunity for gaming the results.

Sharing Nicely

I don’t need a certificate to beat you in chess

by P

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