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This story from thestar.com in Canada shows just why we need to tackle issues over assessment (thanks to Cristina Costa for forwarding). Ryerson University is threatening to expel a student for administering an on-line study group.

“First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university’s senate.

The incident has sent shock waves through student ranks, says Kim Neale, 26, the student union’s advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing.

“All these students are scared s—less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it’s no different than any study group working together on homework in a library,” said Neale.

“That’s the worst part; it’s creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend’s wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this – and my prof sees this, am I cheating?” said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.”

Ir seems fairly ridiculous that we spend so much time and trouble working on the use of new technologies for collaborative learning - and even more so for encouraging autonomous learning, only for academic institutions to take actions like this. Furthermore, every survey of employers suggests that the ability to work as part of a team is both one of the most sought after competencies and one which they feel is not being taught by the education system.

If the university is really worried about the integrity of its assessment system there are many things they could do. At a simple level why not set group assignments. Peer group assessment can provide for individual assessment within a group. Or, they could take a little more time and trouble and develop more authentic assessment to test each learner’s ability to apply knowledge developed through group work.

As Chris Avenir says ” if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.”

Agggh - this is just what I feared. For some time I have been convinced we are at a turning point in our development of education and training systems and provision. I won’t go into all the reasons here - suffice to say that I believe education is intrinsically toed up in societal development - including economic development - and that our present education systems are based on the needs and forms of the first industrial revolutions and have failed to change to reflect the profound changes in society resulting from the digital revolution.

That systems will change and change dramatically is without doubt in my opinion. The direction of such change is less clear. I believe there is a big danger that systems will become privatized with state provision becoming a second class option. Furthermore, education is deeply tied up with societal values. Companies will not usually reflect those values in their totality.

I have no problem with MacDonald’s offering training programmes. Far from it. I do have two issues. One - why the hype? Why is the Prime Minister announcing new apprenticeship programmes by a few major companies. The rub is in the detail. MacDonald’s and other organisations will now be able to accredit their own programmes. They will become private examination boards. It could be argued that a number of the examination boards in the UK are effectively private organisations. But their purpose is to accredit learning. MacDonald’s primary purpose is to make p-rofit for shareholders by selling hamburgers.

Perhaps I am being paranoid, but I fear the reason that prime minister brown has announced these new programme sis that this represent another large shift towards privatising education and training in the UK.

From the Guardian: “The prime minister has defended the accreditation of in-company qualifications after it was announced that staff at McDonald’s could gain the equivalent of an A-level in burger bar management.

The fast food giant, Network Rail and the airline Flybe are the first three companies to win government approval to become an exam board.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has approved a pilot “basic shift manager” course, which will train staff in everything they need to run a McDonald’s outlet, from marketing to human resources and customer service skills.

The budget airline Flybe will start piloting their “airline trainer programme” in the summer, which will cover everything from engineering to cabin crew training.

Much of the course will fit with the QCA’s Qualifications and Credit Framework, which allows credits for units of work to build up to full qualifications over time.

The company hopes to award qualifications equal to good GCSEs and up to university degrees.

Network Rail is piloting an initial qualification in track engineering and hopes to issue qualifications equivalent to GCSEs, but with some units at postgraduate level that could contribute to a master’s qualification.

Speaking on GMTV, Brown said: “You have got to do a pretty intensive course to get that qualification. It’s not that standards are going to fall. It’s going to be a tough course. Once you’ve got that qualification you can go anywhere.”

Been meaning to blog about this for some time. Jenny Hughes forwarded me the link today so I have finally got round to it.

Why is the Scottish Chartered Teacher scheme so interesting.

Firstly it recognises that teachers can develop their career without leaving the classroom. In other words it values the activities of being a teacher, rather than in most systems where career advancement is based on becoming a manager.

Secondly it introduces a framework for Continuing Professional Development, based on professional values and personal commitments.

Perhaps most important is the the Chartered Teacher qualification is based largely on reflective learning and self evaluation.

The Standard has four key components:

a. professional values and personal commitments;
b. professional knowledge and understanding;
c. professional and personal attributes;
d. professional action.

The basic assumption is that the Chartered Teacher is characterised by four central professional values and personal commitments:

a. effectiveness in promoting learning in the classroom;
b. critical self-evaluation and development;
c. collaboration and influence;
d. educational and social values.

You can find out more about the Chartered Teacher Scheme on the Scottish Government’s Standard for Chartered Teachers web site.

I have been trying to reorganize my feedreader and picked up this post from June from Jeremy Herbert’s Headspace blog. It quotes a post by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen about what he seeks in new hires:

DRIVE: “First, drive. I define drive as self-motivation — people who will walk right through brick walls, on their own power, without having to be asked, to achieve whatever goal is in front of them. People with drive push and push and push and push and push until they succeed.”

CURIOSITY: “Second criterion: curiosity. Curiosity is a proxy for, do you love what you do? Anyone who loves what they do is inherently intensely curious about their field, their profession, their craft. They read about it, study it, talk to other people about it… immerse themselves in it, continuously. And work like hell to stay current in it. Not because they have to. But because they love to.

ETHICS: “Third and final criterion: ethics. Ethics are hard to test for. But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate’s background or references. And avoid, avoid, avoid. Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of a metaphorical jailhouse conversion are quite low.”

I think this is interesting and would agree with much of it but it raises some questions. Firstly, I would add a fourth category:

“COLLABORATION. The fourth criteria is collaboration. The ability to work with others is a critical source of learning. Even more so the ability to collaborate is central to developing and sharing knowledge. Collaboration leads to informal learning, innovation and productivity. Collaboration includes listening and valuing other peoples opinions as much as putting forward one’s own.”

The problem is that even if new pedagogic approaches involve curiosity and collaboration for learning, when we seek to assess and certificate competences, these are not qualities we value.

Is it possible to develop new forms of assessment that value drive, curiosity, ethics and collaboration? Is it even desirable that we seek to measure such things? What is the relation between our measurement of general educational learning or vocational skills and knowledge and what might be called the soft skills highlighted by Marc Andreessen.

Technorati Tags: competence development, assessment

I never thought I would be interested in assessment. But, the more I look at how we can develop and implement new pedagogies - especially to take advantage of the potentials of computers for learning - we hit the barrier of assessment systems. In the UK it almost seems that the whole education system is being driven by assessment.

 In this context the following article - from the Guardian newspaper - is interesting. Also interesting to see the kneejerk reaction from both the government and the opposition.

“The watchdog for teaching in England yesterday put itself on a collision course with ministers by calling for all national school tests before the age of 16 to be scrapped.

The intervention by the General Teaching Council for England (GTC), which added new weight to long-running demands for a reduction in the testing regime, was firmly rebuffed by the government and the Conservatives…..

Compulsory standard assessment tests (Sats) are taken in England at seven, 11 and 14. Pilot schemes launched in January could lead ultimately to the tests being taken when pupils are ready, rather than at fixed points in the year, but ministers regard their existence as non-negotiable.

In evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee’s inquiry on pupil assessment, the GTC says most children take an average of 70 different exams or tests before the age of 16, making them the most tested in the world.

The GTC wants “sampling” of standards, covering a few primary and secondary schools, to guide national policy, along with internal school exams held by teachers when they thought appropriate.

The move is significant because the GTC is notionally independent of both the government and the unions. It is responsible for registering teachers and has banned them from helping pupils in Sats exams.”

In the paper I published on the site last week, I talked about the present system of assessment being a barrier to the introduction of e-Portfolios and pedagogic innovation. I cited Richard Stiggins  who distinguishes between assessment for learning and assessment of learning.

There is no doubt which paradigm the UK follows. An article in todays Observer newspaper highlights the increasing problem of exma related stress for school students. “Unprecedented numbers of psychologists are now having to help pupils deal with the emotional strain - which can lead to sleepless nights, eating disorders and other illnesses”, they say.

The artcile goes on to say that Place2Be - a charity offering emotional support to primary school children - has seen a massive increase in the numbers of pupils approaching counsellors about exams.

“The charity runs a project called Place2Talk in 113 schools where children can post requests to see a counsellor into postboxes placed in the school buildings. So far 70 per cent of the children in the schools have asked for support.

Sheridan Whitfield, a manager for the charity in London, said children from the age of five were able to place requests for a chat into postboxes placed in the school. ‘Children are accessing it more for exam worries.’

The relentless pressure means psychologists are being called into schools at an increasing rate, according to Hill: ‘We are doing this in a way that we were not doing it five years ago.”"

This is ridiculous. It has nothing to do with education and learning. We need a concerted effort to develop and implement new forms of assessment - including self assessment, group assessment and peer assessment. We need to develop ideas about authentic assessment - where the process of work itself, rather than the endlessly spiraling test regime.

I am much taken by a comment by Scott last week: “…we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media does not contain interaction; instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive - Flickr/Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive content, yet the content is highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments…).”

Of course he is right. And it is pretty easy to understand the implications in terms of how we work and learn and in how we develop e-learning content. It is less easy to work out how it effects how we report on our work. On the one hand our work will not be in one place - it will be scattered across different media and on different web sites. Last year we started looking at some of the implications of this in a seminar called ‘How Dude, where’s my Data‘. NB I have finally got together a wiki documenting at least some of the outcomes of that seminar.

But students are still assessed largely on the outcome of their learning and in terms of their competence. Not - here are my connections - but here is something I have done and here is something I claim I can do. This is far less easy to document in terms of network nodes.

It may be that the e-Portfolios of the future will have to be based far more on process than merely outcomes - more here is something I claim I am competent to do and here is the interactions I have made which allows me to say this - rather than here is a thing I have made which allows me to claim I am competent.

I still feel that competence is a difficult concept pedagogically and am worried that educational technologists will see competence as a mere unproblematic taxonomy. This matters. If we are to develop and implement e-Portfolios - let alone Personal Learning environments - we have to get clear on these issues.

In the discussions I am having over e-Portfolios there is increasing agreement of the use of blogging type applications as a way of recording learning progress. There is also an awareness of the power of personal networks for peer feedback as an aid to reflection. BUT - and it is a big but - institutions and e-Portfolio providers still (naturally) want some way of representing achievement. How can we do this dynamically? Perhaps competence looks more like a tag cloud or a mind map than a ’skills journal’.