e-Assessment

Answers to some common questions about the OBI.

Integrate OpenBadges in Blackboard Learn to allow faculty to display student badges from mozilla backpack, allow faculty create new badges in courses, allow students claim badges. A student photo roster will  accompany this project, so the facutly can preview not only the faces of students, but badges earned in other classes.  This will help faculty to get to know students prior to start of a class and to track their progress in the learning networks outside of the classroom.

If you have ever been a boy scout or girl guide, you would have been awarded a badge to recognise your achievements in a skill, experience or deed. This would have been sewn proudly on your shirt o...

I think this sums up well a range of the opportunities and threats open badges present, providing key areas for consideration as a more robust and individualised approach to assessment and credentialising knowledge, skills and achievement moves ahead.

Fascinating article flipping concepts of assessment and what we assess. Downes explores the reasons for plagiarism and cheating in exams and considers the over-arching societal changes that may be required to create the kind of environment that would reduce these behaviours. 

Success and how it is measured continues to be one of the "known unknowns" for MOOCs. Debate (hype) on success is heightened by the now recognised and recorded high drop out rates. If "only" 3,000 registered users complete a MOOC then it must be failing, mustn't it? If you don't get the certificate/badge/whatever then you have failed. Well in one sense that might be true - if you take completion to equate with success. For a movement that is supposed to be revolutionising the (HE) system, the initial metrics some of the big xMOOCs are measuring and being measured by are pretty traditional. Some of the best known success of recent years have been college "drop outs', so why not embrace that difference and the flexibility that MOOCs offer learners?

Well possibly because doing really new things and introducing new educational metrics is hard and even harder to sell to venture capitalists, who don't really understand what is "broken" with education. Even for those who supposedly do understand education e.g. governments find any change to educational metrics (and in particular assessments) really hard to implement. In the UK we have recent examples of this with Michael Gove's proposed changes to GSCEs and in Scotland the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence has been a pretty fraught affair over the last five years.

Badge system design paper released A quick post to direct you to a new paper that I've been writing about badge system design principles: Badge System Design Principles, Part 1. It's a publicly acc...

In case you missed it, Coursera announced its new Signature Track option for credentialing students (and making money for Coursera) and connecting them to future employers. It's future could be in: headhunting.

Sponsored Q&A: Is university assessment in need of tranformation?

Provides a number of links to articles and tools focusing on assessment for learning and authentic assessment. 

This post covers work I have been doing recently on developing a badging system for the online courses we run at the JISC RSC Scotland, using the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). The courses are not formally assessed or accredited so we only issue a Certificate of Completion for successful completion. Much of the course content is created by the learners and it also incorporates peer review so we do also issue a peer award.

We wanted to investigate ways to give the certificate and peer award more impact than just a piece of paper stuck in a drawer...