George Siemens interviewed Dave Cormier on his recent article in Innovate, Rhizomic Education.

I found this 3 minute portion of the interview more lucid than the article itself regarding community, curriculum and learning in context. It argues, “people will learn by being part of a community (that has a purpose).”

In the interview, Cormier speaks of the course he taught summer 08 – Educational Technology and the Adult Learner. He describes his approach to the course as crediting the student as having their own ability to create knowledge. His premise is that all that is to be known is out there and the learner’s task is to contextualize what is known to the learner and the learner’s needs.

Cormier describes the product of the course as a “textbook” written by the students, but more than an object, he calls it a set of skills and knowledge that students would build out in their own lives (i.e., their professional practice).

I wanted to explore the learning outcomes of the course at greater depth. In his day-8 reflection Cormier says: “What we did not focus on was outlining the ‘takeaways’ that students needed to bring out of the course itself, at least, not in a communal sense. … In a very real sense, each of those students will be taking a very different set of takeaways from this course, related to what they themselves put in, how they contributed to the community and where they are going to take those new literacies when they go back to their own professional practice.”

This didn’t really satisfy me. Take aways are fine, but the students also needed to know where they sit within the community’s norms, the profession’s norms. In following the ideas in Stephen Downes’  Open Source Assessment I think Cormier should have provided the assessment used in the course for community inspection. If I understand Downes’ premise, what is missing in Cormier’s course is the assessment criteria. It is especially important in Cormier’s course because the course-as-community is developing the curriculum — the learners need to be in conversation with the wider community about norms of performance.

With the assessment criteria, you and I could look at the students’ work to see if we could “recognize” (Downes’ term) quality learning outcomes in the products of Cormier’s course. I’m not interested in Cormier ranking the students as much as answering for myself “are they competent?”, “would I hire them?”, “or where are they making progress to those goals?” Those are questions that have an authenticity to a community of practice, such as Cormier seems to be describing.

At WSU we have been thinking about community roles in shaping the assessment criteria for student work and how that changes the ways we think about the grade book.   Among those ideas is that the assessment is more than a single number in a gradebook: it might be useful to express numbers along several dimensions of skill, its criteria should be open to community discussion, and the assessment should do more than measure the student, it should inform the student, assignment, course, academic program, and community  (that is, it should be a transformative assessment). Consequently, we have been thinking about how the community would have access to the assessment criteria for two purposes (beyond assessing the students): 1) assess the assignment — is this assignment driving at producing the competencies that it holds the students to and, broader, 2) is this assessment measuring the competencies that the community values. Its in this latter sense that Downes’ Open Source Assessment piece is important to our thinking – beyond community as curriculum to community as assessment.