Education 2.0 and Assessment

In the last year I've spent way too many hours thinking about Education 2.0 and assessment. Most of my thinking has been about ways to gather objective data about the impact of adding the various Web 2.0 tools. (There are plenty of Social Science studies that ask students how they feel about Web 2.0, but very little about actual impact on student learning.)

But this week I started to think about Education 2.0 versus the assessment activities that we are currently carrying out at the college. We're supposed to design some activities to assess student learning. These activities should do a couple of things:

1. Check to see if our students are learning what we say they should learn. That is are they meeting class, program or college objectives.
2. Check to see how effective the activity is. The results of the assessment activities are should provide instructors some insight and feedback about student performance. If the students perform as expected then it can probably be assumed that they learned the subject. If the students don't perform as expected, then something probably needs to be changed.

I think the assessment activities are very valuable, and coming from industry, I'm surprised that we don't do more complete assessments.

But as I work on Education 2.0 and see it's impact, I feel a little perplexed by the assessment activities we're doing at the college. It's like we're on a big ship where we need to deliver a cargo to a distant port. We're being asked to measure a bunch of little things like cabin temperature or number of cans of chili left in the food locker. These things may be somewhat important to a successful voyage, but in the big picture they're actually pretty incidental to things like steering the ship. Moving from Education 1.0 to Education would be even bigger than changing the ship's course, it would be like changing from a sail powered boat to a modern nuclear powered ship.

There still's some value in measuring the little things, but they have such a small impact on student learning compared to moving to Education 2.0. I'm hopeful that the rest of the college will soon share this feeling.