Open Course in Education Futures

We've received several questions about accreditation for this course. It's difficult when confronted with the multitude of options available for learning to choose, and one of the key things that people are looking for in a learning experience is a defined set of outcomes for them professionally. They want to be able to justify the time to the institutions, to their colleagues and to the people they share their lives with.

An uber-simplistic review of assessment and accreditation - Just so we're on the same page
The problem of accreditation is that it is, usually, based on some assessment model particular to a given field... and the accreditation speaks to a given kind of assessment. That is, if I look at your 'notification of accreditation', it tells me that someone has assessed that you have the kinds of skills/knowledge/awareness that comes from having succeeded in a particular program. You have received 'credit' for 'having' a given thing... and this thing that you have is sometimes 'knowledge' and more often just the information that might mean that you have a specific kind of knowledge. This is accreditation based on assessment models like standards testing, on the instructor deciding what information or knowledge a learner should get from a program, and checking to see if it's 'there'. Useless for this course.

More progressive kinds of assessment, particularly those that claim to assess people's 'complex' understandings of a given topic, are more holistic. A good example of this may be a learning portfolio created by a students and reviewed by an instructor. The instructor might be looking for higher orders of learning... evidence of creative thinking, of the development of complex concepts or looking for things like improvement. The assessment, then, is looking give a number of literacies acquired by a learner through the course of engaging with other learners, with the course material or the other methods used for encouraging the development of literacies.

This is more like what we're going to be doing here, but as anyone who's done this kind of assessment knows, its more labour intensive (both in a time sense, but also cognitively for the assessor). It also requires a very organized system, and sometimes leads to the same kinds of 'you learned this, you learned this' checkbox dangers of information based assessment.

Given the large number of participants, and given the time constraints that both George and I live under, I'm going to propose a couple of assessments methods and a couple of accreditation models in order to get the conversation started. I probably didn't need to make the above distinction between 'i know' and 'i can' between acquiring information vs. developing literacies for 95% of you... but there's always one...

Given that we're looking to confirm literacies acquired...

Assessment
There is a simple sense in which assessing people for this course involves tracking their willingness to participate in the discussion. I have claimed in many contexts that in fields in which the canon is difficult to identify, where what is 'true' is not possible to identify knowledge becomes a negotiation. This will certainly true in this course, so I think the most important part of the assessment will be whether the learner in question has collaborated, has participated has ENGAGED with the material and with other participants of the course.

It is more than possible, however, to participate in bad faith. I have had any number of assessment models challenged by learners who increased their posting by saying some version of 'hurrays, what a great comment' and claimed that they were providing peer review. So any good qualitative assessment model requires some mechanism (preferably people based) that filters participation for good faith. Not 'good' in the sense that participants agree with each other, but rather good in the sense that there is an honest engagement with other participants.

What we need, then, is a peer review model for assessment. We need people to take it as their responsibility to review the work of others, to confirm their engagement, and form community/networks of assessment that monitor and help each other.

1. People wishing peer assessment mark indicate this in their personal accounts, thereby becoming part of the peer assessment model
2. Blogged/forumed responses to the weekly material, collected in some form of portfolio (by tag, username, googledoc... whatever)
3. Community/network recognition as a 'participator' (commenting engaging with others work) (say... 3-5 other participants are willing to sign off on your participation)
4. Evidence of contribution on course projects
5. VERY LIGHT review by course facilitators

That last one is tricky... some people are excellent organizers and don't contribute much 'content'. Again, we'd need evidence from the rest of the network of this contribution... whereas the content might be a tad easier to track.

Accreditation
This is a slightly different kettle of fish. We have some participants who are looking for 'credit' in the sense that they want to have the course qualify for Professional Development. We have others who are hoping for course credit, or partial credit for courses that require 'working on the internet' (something that is becoming more common).

I think for those that are looking for PD credit we should be able to use the proposed assessment model (once you guys make it better) for accreditation. You would end up with an email that said "i was assessed based on this model and was not found wanting" signed by facilitators (or other participants, as surely given the quality of the participants i've seen, they would qualify as people who could guarantee such a thing).

As far as course credit goes... this is more complicated. With a course where the curriculum evolves during the course, the course may need to be finished before we could find out what it is about. There is a syllabus, but there are some institutions that require much more than that to start talking about 'credit'.

I think the Otago model would work well here. I call it the Otago model as Leigh Blackall's course at Otago was the first time i actually heard of someone doing it. In this model you do all the work in a given course, and then are assessed for credit AFTER the course by, essentially, challenging for PLAR. It's a nice distributed model, as it allows different people to get different credit for the same course. It might be helpful for us to start gathering links to institutions that might have programs that people can challenge for... crowd source the search for accreditation. ha. i like it.

Conclusion
It's going to be pretty tough for George and I to guarantee that any of the 200 or so possible participants have acquired any set of literacies. It is possible, however, that if we organize ourselves appropriately, we could manage to create an assessment model for open courses that we could work on here, and offer back to the educational community after this course.

If people are interested in this, I'll create the functionality in this drupal to identify yourself as part of the peer assessment, to allow people to write recommendations for individual users, and to create a model that we can all follow for that assessment. I'll wait on comments to this post before i start the work.