In July we made a proposal for a presentation for the AAC&U conference in January 2009 (which has been accepted, see you in Seattle).  A previous post serves as an index to the materials we are collecting for that presentation. The AAC&U call for proposals asked a series of questions that reveal their perspective on the roles of the institution, faculty, students and the wider community in the learning enterprise.

The assumptions and perspectives that appear to underlie AAC&U’s framing of the questions are summarized in the table below. The preamble to the call for proposals also expresses a concern for maintaining the relevance of colleges and universities and maintaining the importance of the values of a liberal education. We see a conflict between the AAC&U assumptions and the goal of maintaining relevance in a Web 2.0 world.

The work we are reporting at the conference comes from a different set of assumptions about the learning enterprise. The perspective is community centered. It uses a set of assumptions that have previously existed within institutions of higher learning, and to some extent, still exist at the PhD level, but which seem to have been displaced by the challenges of increasing scale and decreasing resources. We are exploring ways in which the Internet, and particularly the Web 2.0 perspective of the Internet, can facilitate a transformation to a different set of assumptions.

Central to this thinking is our work from last summer on a Harvesting (or Transformative) Grade book.  An important aspect of this re-visioning of the grade book is its move into a Web 2.0 context and its role in facilitating our assumptions about learning in communities (right column in table). This work is related to ideas Stephen Downes shared about group vs network learning and the lists below are worth examining in light of his diagram of that idea.  This little video about connectivism gives some other ideas about faculty roles and implementation of our community-centric assumptions.   Some very good comments about the role of the faculty appears ¾ of the way into the video.

Institution-centric (AAC&U) view Community-centric View
The institution and faculty are the central node. The learner is the central node; learners include all members of the discourse community (or Community of Practice).
The faculty member is the grading authority. Community of Practice holds responsibility (and the social capital) for assessment, and assessment (from the root “assay” as in to sit with) is most useful when it is formative, when it is understood to be constructive feedback rather than an authority’s judgment.
Faculty define the assessment criteria. Community of Practice, by virtue of expert consensus, validates the assessment instrument.
Feedback to the student about learning criteria is masked by the letter grade. Students merit feedback direct and unfiltered from the community using criteria that the community articulates.
Institution is the established (credentialing) authority. Community of Practice is the implicit credentialing authority; the university is the facilitator of that credentialing and of community building.
The unit of analysis is the course, bounded in time, content, and brick or virtual (LMS) space. The unit of analysis is the problem, problems are not bound in time or content.
Problems for students to study are (artificially) constrained by course and disciplinary boundaries. Communities identify authentic problems that are interdisciplinary and reach beyond the definition of the course.
Students rarely share their work with, or receive feedback from, public audiences. ePortfolios built over multiple year are learner owned (not university owned) and used to communicate (collect, select, connect, project, and reflect) with and get feedback from wider communities.
Faculty are a gatekeeper between the students and the community of practice. Students are anticipated to join communities of practice, faculty may introduce students to the community.
Faculty have all the social capital within both the classroom and the community of practice. (Student) learning is social and therefore learners are building social capital within the classroom and withing the community of practice.

Related posts
1. Pilot course using the Harvesting Gradebook
2. Rich assessment data from a Harvesting Gradebook
3. Community conversation about assessment criteria
4. Differences in engaging the discussion among participant groups
5. Different conversations among participant groups
6. Evidence for Impact on Learning

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