OLDaily

The future of assessment: five principles, five targets for 2025
Michelle Pauli, Gill Ferrell, JISC, 2020/02/14

This report (a very brisk 28 page PDF that feels a lot shorter) outlines five major principles of future assessment (quoted):

• Authentic - Assessments designed to prepare students for what they do next, using technology they will use in their careers
• Accessible - Assessments designed with an accessibility-first principle
• Appropriately automated - A balance found of automated and human marking to deliver maximum benefit to students
• Continuous - Assessment data used to explore opportunities for continuous assessment to improve the learning experience
• Secure - Authoring detection and biometric authentication adopted for identification and remote proctoring.

The sections themselves contain some brief discussion of each of the five items and links to companies or projects working on that particular topic. The report sometimes reads as a fairly progressive look at assessment, but the last section (which deals with plagiarism and "contract cheating") brings us back to earth.

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Thinking is just fancy feeling
nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2020/02/14

I wouldn't have worded it this way (I still want to say "knowledge is recognition") but I really really like this formulation by Nick Shackleton-Jones and would certainly say that he captures the essence of it. "People struggle with the idea that thinking is just fancy feeling – that thoughts such as a conversation or a book could just be an extrapolation of the barking sounds that a dog makes. But they are. People aren’t much moved by reason, they are profoundly illogical... But how can thinking be comprised entirely of ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’? Of course it is not. Open a dictionary. Each of those words describes a distinct sentiment."

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7 Things You Should Know About Online Program Management
Bonnie Budd, Phil Hill, Jim Williamson, Jonathan Becker, EDUCAUSE, 2020/02/14

This (2 page PDF) is the latest in the generally-useful '7 Things' series from EDUCAUSE, and it doesn't disappoint. "Online program management (OPM) generally refers to the practice of contracting with external, third-party organizations that help colleges and universities develop and deliver on-line degree or certificate programs." Image: Inside Higher Ed.

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Electronic Pedagogy and Future University Business Models
Fred Niederman, Brian S. Butler, R. Brent Gallupe, Bernard C. Y. Tan, Cathy Urquhart, Paperity, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2020/02/14

After reading through this summary of a panel on university business models - and talk of MOOCs and bundling and other discussion focused on education, you encounter this comment from a Wall Street recruiter on the business value of recruiting at Harvard that undermines this whole discussion: "there is nothing they learn at the Harvard Business School that is any value to our company, but a lot of very bright people apply. We love their screening mechanism. We like that this is face-to-face. We’d lock them into the gymnasium for two years and let them develop the contacts, the rolodex, the connections, unlock the door." In order to create equity in education, it is this that needs to be addressed, not whatever is produced by teaching machines or open educational content.

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How can technology strengthen fact-checking?
Google, Jigsaw, 2020/02/14

It looks like the war against fake content will be similar to the way against spam, as the two sides develop increasingly sophisticated technologies in order to overcome the other. This link is to a project from Google and Jiogsaw called Assembler. "As the technology to create realistic fake images, video and audio becomes more sophisticated, fact-checkers and journalists need similarly advanced tools to counter this threat. Assembler is an experimental platform from Jigsaw and Google Research that hopes to make it easier to judge manipulated media and help prevent the spread of disinformation." I wonder whether at some point we don't accept something as true or verifiable, not even the evidence of our own senses, unless it has been tech-mediated.

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