The Living Schoolbook

We had a small, but highly productive, Outcomes Based Assessment BOF meeting today at the Sakai conference. In attendance was: Janice Smith (rSmart), Wende Morgaine (Portland State), Noah Bottimer (Saginaw Valley State University), Melissa Peet (UMich) and Jim Pease, Joe Shedd and myself (Syarcuse University).

We began the discussion with the diagram I posted yesterday to frame up the discussion. What we turned to really quickly was what new Goal Aware tools are needed. In other words, what new ways do students need to be engaged in the learning process that leverage the ability of student work to be tagged and evaluated based on learning outcomes?

We all agreed that the Goal Aware Assignment tool does a good job of allowing the faculty to make statements about the learning outcomes that they were designing activities to engage students in the learning process. However, it was recognized that knowledge is emergent. As such it was also recognized that their was not a tool that students could use to track their emerging meaning of their own artifacts, whether those artifacts were the product of an assignment designed by faculty or self created. Such a tool would allow users to "free-tag" and "retag" their work as they draw new meaning from it in their own workspace.

For this tool users would, in fact, be engaging in a new activity each time they re-tagged, but it was stressed that this shouldn't require "creating" a new activity and then performing the activity, but rather the tool would need to automatically "create an activity" transparently behind the scenes. The activity itself would allow a user to free-tag work and elaborate about the why's behind the rationale for the tagging. If a user needed to be able to add more goals/goal sets to complete this task, they should be able to do so and then apply them as needed.

This implies that their needs to be a "goal aware view" of resources. This is very much like the "collections" requirements from the OSP 2.5 functional requirements. Following up on the UCamp idea of doing research and developing the personas of users that the tool is to be designed for, I wanted to know if we had data that suggested that users might be familiar with other free-tagging tools (such as iTunes and GMail) I was told that this is actually ubiquitous in the literature. Even it was not, it was stressed that educators absolutely want to develop those skills in students of they do not already possess them.

After retagging and elaborating on a file there should be an option to submit and get feedback from someone. We considered the 2.4 requirement to make the wizard pages goal aware and auto-populate may help to provide this functionality. Evaluators should be able to use the evaluator tool to aggregate submitted work for review and comment.

The advantage of the Goal Aware tool approached to assessment is that it allows evaluation of student work from either faculty designed experiences or from student designed activities, reflection and submission.