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Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, Jayme Jacobson, Theron DesRosier
The AAC&U 2009 conference, Global Challenge, College Learning, and America’s Promise asks a series of questions about “the relationship between college learning and society” and the Call for Proposal notes “[College and university] failure to fully engage our publics with the kinds of learning best suited to our current needs…” [For further evidence of this failure, see Boeing to Rank Colleges, Chronicle, 9/19/08 (comment added 9/18/08)]
[Additional evidence of this challenge comes from the students themselves, in this manifesto Innovate or Die, Student2oh.org, accessed 10/7/08, Anthony Chiveta argues that this generation of students understands the Web 2.0 concept and wants it applied to education (see also Learning 2.0) (comment added 10/7/08)]
The following is an abstract submitted in response to the Call above. It served as an opportunity to “rise above” our work on these topics and reflect on its implications.
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Assessment of learning by a community inside and outside the classroom is a key component to developing students’ global competencies and building a strong relationship between college learning and society.
In 2007-08 Washington State University conducted an ePortfolio Contest to demonstrate ways to harness the interests and expertise of the WSU community to address real world problems encountered by communities both locally and globally. It called upon contestants to collaborate with community members – institutional, local, or global – to identify a problem, explore solutions, develop a plan, and then take steps toward implementing that plan. Contestants were asked to use electronic portfolios to capture and reflect on their collaborative problem-solving processes and the impact of their projects. Judges from industry, the local community, and WSU used a rubric based on the WSU Critical Thinking Rubric to evaluate the portfolios. Since the contest, we have been distilling design principles for portfolios that facilitate learning.
This exploration has taught us to value the learner consciously leaving a ‘learning trace’ as they work on a problem, and we believe the capturing and sharing of that trace is an important part of documenting learning. A striking example illustrating a learning trace in a portfolio is one of the winners in our contest. Not only does this portfolio exhibit a learning trace, it captures feedback from the community regarding the quality of the work. A recent AAC&U survey of employers supports this bias for richer documentation of learner skills.
Our thinking about portfolios for learning is moving us away from traditional ideas about courses contained in classrooms and toward Stephen Downes’ eLearning 2.0 ideas: “Students’ [learning portfolios] are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students [work in this way], is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network, and much like Wenger’s community of practice.” And far from being trivial social networking, our portfolio contest captured rich and substantive learning happening in the community outside the classroom.
But documentation of learning, without feedback, guidance and assessment leaves the learner to work without the support of a community, which has led us to a recognition that grade books are QWERTY artifacts of a Learning 1.0 model. To address that, we have been exploring ways to transform the grade book (see this and this) to support learners working simultaneously within the university and within their communities of practice. This approach to a grade book has the additional benefit for the scholarship of teaching and learning of gathering feedback on the assignment, course and program from the community at the same time that it invites the community to assess a learner’s work. Such feedback can help the university engage its publics in a discussion of the kinds of learning most suited to current needs.
The questions in the AAC&U Call will be used to help the audience highlight and frame the discussion of our ideas.
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The Call “invites proposals of substantive, engaging sessions that will raise provocative questions, that will engage participants in discussion, and that will create and encourage dialogue–before, during, and after the conference itself.”
In the spirit of the AAC&U call, you are invited to engage this discussion before or after the conference by posting comments here, on the related pages, or by tracking back from your own blog, and then meet us in Seattle to further the conversation.
Theron DesRosier, Jayme Jacobson, Nils Peterson
Previously we described ideas on Transforming the Grade Book, by way of elaborating on Gary Brown’s ideas of a “Harvesting Gradebook.”
Here we demonstrate an implementation of those ideas in the form of a website with student work and embedded assessment. This demonstration is implemented in Microsoft SharePoint with the WSU Critical and Integrative Thinking rubric as the criteria and a Google Doc survey as the data collection vehicle, but other platforms could be used to contain the student work and other assessment rubrics delivered in other survey tools could be developed. (Note- this implementation is built with baling wire and duct tape and the implementation would not scale.)
There are four examples of student work (a Word document with track changes, a blog post, a wiki diff and an email), to illustrate the variety of student work that might be collected and the variety of contexts in which students might be working. This student work might be organized as part of an institutionally sponsored hub-and-spoke style LMS or in an institutionally sponsored ePortfolio (as WSU is doing with SharePoint mySites) or directly in venues controlled by the student (see for example the blog and email examples below) where the student embeds a link to the grade book provided by the academic program.
Examples of Assessing Student Work (aka transformed ‘grading’)
The first example is a Microsoft Word document, stored in SharePoint, and included in this page with Document Viewer web part. You are seeing the track changes and comments in the Word document. In some browsers you will see pop-up notes and the identities of the reviewers.
To the right of the document is the rubric for assessing the work. Clicking on “Expand” in the rubric will open a new window with details of the rubric dimension and a Google Doc survey where you can enter a numeric score and comments of your assessment of the work with this criteria.
This survey also collects information about your role because it is important in our conceptualization of this transformed grade book to have multiple perspectives and to be able to analyze feedback based on its source.
In our description of the workflow that for this assessment process we say:
Instructors start the process by defining assignments for their classes and “registering” them with the academic program. Various metadata are associated with the assignment in the registration process. Registration is important because in the end the process we propose will be able to link up student work, assessment of the work, the assignment that prompted the work, and assessments of the assignment.
This demonstration shows one of the important impacts of the “registration” — as a reviewer of the student’s work, you can follow a link to see the assignment that generated this piece of student work, AND, you can then apply the assessment criteria to the assignment itself.
Finally, as an effort in ongoing improvement of the assessment instrument itself, the survey asks for information about the learning outcome, its description and relevance, with the assumption that the rubric is open for revision over time.
In this demo, you can complete the survey and submit data, but your data will not be visible in later parts of the demo. Rather, specific data for demonstration purposes will be presented elsewhere.
The second example is a blog post, in Blogger, included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right of the post is the rubric implemented in the form of a survey. With the Page Viewer web part the reviewer can navigate around the web from the blog post to see relevant linked items.
While this demonstration has embedded the blog post into a SharePoint site, that is not a requirement. The student could embed the rubric into the footer of the specific blog or in the margin of the whole blog. To demonstrate the former of these ideas, we have embedded a sample at the bottom of this post. Adding criterion-based feedback extends the power of comment and trackback already inherent in blogging.
The third example is a Wiki Diff, again included in the site with SharePoint’s Page Viewer web part. Again, to the right is a rubric implemented in the form of a survey.
The fourth example is an email the student wrote. This was embedded into the SharePoint site, but as with the blog example, the author could have included a link to criterion-based review as part of the footer of the email.
A subsequent post will address visualization of this data by the student, the instructor, and the academic program.
We have been exploring the idea of “hub and spoke” course designs where the learners are using ePortfolios and Web 2.0 tools and working in communities and contexts where their chosen problem is being addressed. For such a course, we have been using the term Hub and Spoke to describe how the institutionally-operated course space (hub) relates to the learners and the learner’s electronic spaces. (see: Out of the Classroom and Into the Boardroom (PDF),
Out of the Classroom and Beyond, Case Study of Electronic Portfolios, and ePortfolio as the Core Learning Application.
Recently Blackboard has been adding “Web 2.0″ features, so we had a discussion to delineate the reasons to use SharePoint rather than Blackboard as the hub in a hub and spoke course design.
Worldware
Worldware is a double reason. First, students are learning skills in SharePoint that they can later in work contexts, where Blackboard skills are not useful outside the school context. Second, as our university adopts SharePoint for a variety of administrative purposes, there become a larger group of SharePoint experts who can provide support to both faculty and students using SharePoint as a learning platform.
Document Library and Tagging
SharePoint’s document libraries are very flexible, allowing users to add metadata that suites their purposes. In CTLT’s ePortfolio contest ctlt.wsu.edu/contest07/ we have had several examples of this, perhaps of the most developed is in this winner’s portfolio. (Its also worth noting that this contestant used email to send documents to the library (a SharePoint feature that integrated the “collect” phase of her portfolio work more completely with her other project work). We are now exploring how to mashup SharePoint document libraries with other tools to create timelines showing the evolution of ideas in the portfolio.
Authorization controls
While WSU has a mechanism for outsiders to gain an identity and login to university systems, as we have Blackboard configured, instructors can only authorize people into courses in the role of Teaching Assistant. Further, authorization to a Blackboard course gives access to the whole course, there is no fine-grained control to specific parts of the course. Finally, a SharePoint site can be configured for anonymous read, opening (portions of) the course to the world if needed. (see correction in comments below)
“Pre-cooked” webparts and tools
SharePoint has a concept for exporting sites and elements of sites (libraries, web parts, surveys, etc) as .STP files and then re-importing these into other sites or adding them to templates for users to choose. This allows time-savings such as configuring a document library with specific columns, or an RSS reader with specific feeds pre-installed.
Adding more tools
Finally, SharePoint’s architecture enables other linkages and mashups. It is a source and consumer of RSS, will support embedding of other Web 2.0 resources in its pages, and can capture email and originate email alerts. And with the SharePoint mySite, where the student is the owner of the SharePoint site over the span of their career, there is greater flexibility to support the hub and spoke models.
