I’ve had the privilege of speaking with a few well respected academic about learning design and education more generally over the course of the last couple of weeks as we work towards putting together a grant proposal. Quite naturally, our discussions about the grant have wandered off into interesting areas relating to education and especially online learning and design. One key point of our discussion has related to the notion of assessment within online learning environments. Our discussions in this area were stimulated by Kalantzis, Cope and Shearsmith’s (2020) work, and in particular their discussion about ergative assessment. For myself, I also brought in some of the work that I have been undertaking individually, especially the work of SImon Buckingham-Shum and Ryan Baker. It’s a pretty broad spread, and I’m not going to do their ideas justice in a 400 word blog post, but I wanted to recognise the influences on my own ideas in this piece.
I guess my thinking was put into motion by the idea of ‘What is the purpose of assessment?’ That’s not meant to be a trick question: the answer is to find out what or how well) students have learned during the course. In this way, assessments are a proxy for learning – that is, they are the mechanism that we use for measuring learning, but – and this is the crucial bit – they are not the learning itself. There could be dozens of reasons why a student has learned something, but then doesn’t present that information in any assessment (and, of course, some might argue that if they don’t then they haven’t really learned it – a position I think is a bit behaviouristic for me).
In a similar way, online discussion boards are proxies for in class discussions, either between the students or between students and teachers. So, what happened when discussion boards are part of the assessment of students’ learning? That is, we are assessing students’ contributions to discussion boards as a proxy for their learning in their class. But how can this be done? There are lots of possibilities – for example, number and timeliness of contributions, sentiment analysis of the contributions, the strucutre of the contributions, the interactions between students and students and students and teachers – but are any of these suitably close to the learning? And what happens when students, who know it is assessable, sanitise their conversations? That is, they take these discussions somewhere else – to an online discussion dark web, so to speak – and then only present, on the formal discussion board, something that they feel is acceptable for assessment purposes.
(More to come)