vConnecting with Rebecca Petersen at AAEEBL
A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston. This particular one is with Rebecca Petersen. Enjoy :)
Posts
Measuring Learning
I know... I know... This is perhaps a tricky question to answer, but bear with me here, Perhaps the answer to this question of "how do we measure learning" is "well, d'uh! with some sort of test or assessment". This might be true in one-off training, you visibly see employees either performing or not performing, but when it comes to a higher education context what does it mean to have been badged, branded, certified (whatever the term you use) as having had an education? In Higher Education we measure "learning" through a credit hour system. But what the heck does that mean? Well, I know what it means and its history , but how the heck does that connect to learning? There are three critical incidents that got me thinking about this today. First is a conversation I had with a prospective student for my day-job. The person who was inquiring about our program was asking about how many weeks our courses run each semester. When I informed them th...
Assessment of....?
Image from Flickriver, Brian Hillegas A few days ago, and totally by stroke of chance, I happened upon a twitter discussion between @HybridPed , @otterscotter , @actualham , and a few others. I am not sure what the original topic was but I came in when they were discussing assessment. Do we assess learning or competency? Some regarded learning as transcending competency and some saw competency as transcending learning. It's hard to to really have a meaningful exchange of ideas in 140 characters, especially when the twitter train grows and grows. When I jumped into this conversation I took the stance that what we assess is learning, not competency. Competency, I would argue, is something that develops over a period of time. It is something you hone and improve. Your skills (i.e. your competency is something) becomes improved the more your practice it. And, by practice, I mean being present while doing it and analyzing your own performance while doing the t...