Home :: Browse by Keyword :: A

Assessment

A (191) | B (117) | C (166) | D (158) | E (301) | F (58) | G (68) | H (113) | I (249) | J (23) | K (6) | L (189) | M (143) | N (31) | O (90) | P (145) | Q (1) | R (74) | S (334) | T (402) | U (5) | V (45) | W (72) | Y (1) | Z (4) |

The ERIAL Project: Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries

Posted May 17th, 2010 by Andrew Asher, Lynda Duke and David Green
1 Comments | 11339 Page Views
Librarians and faculty often think they know how students conduct research, but when a group of five college and university libraries used anthropologists to observe and interview students at work, there were some interesting observations about what happens in the course of an assignment. In this article, the authors discuss the project rationale, the scope of the research and the instructive findings that will guide efforts on their campuses to strengthen students' information literacy skills and facility with academic research tools.

HASTAC Scholars Forum: Grading 2.0--Evaluation in the Digital Age

Posted November 22nd, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 7833 Page Views

HASTAC Scholars are at it again! Check it out and join the conversation.

http://www.hastac.org/scholars

Are current grading and assessment techniques keeping up with how students learn and what they need to know? How can digital media be used to develop new grading and assessment strategies?

HASTAC Scholars Forum: Grading 2.0--Evaluation in the Digital Age

Posted November 22nd, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 7833 Page Views

HASTAC Scholars are at it again! Check it out and join the conversation.

http://www.hastac.org/scholars

Are current grading and assessment techniques keeping up with how students learn and what they need to know? How can digital media be used to develop new grading and assessment strategies?

Register for NERCOMP's "Getting on the Assessment Bandwagon"

Posted November 22nd, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 1314 Page Views
Registration is now open for NERCOMP's January 22nd workshop, "Getting on the Assessment Bandwagon: Interpreting Results from National Surveys." For a full schedule and registration information, please go to http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5890

Register for NERCOMP's "Getting on the Assessment Bandwagon"

Posted November 22nd, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 1314 Page Views
Registration is now open for NERCOMP's January 22nd workshop, "Getting on the Assessment Bandwagon: Interpreting Results from National Surveys." For a full schedule and registration information, please go to http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5890

NERCOMP Workshop "Assessment on a Shoestring"

Posted August 14th, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 1427 Page Views
Registration is now open for NERCOMP's Oct. 9th workshop: "Assessment on a Shoestring." For details and registration, see http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5818.

Registration open for NERCOMP workshop "Assessment into Action"

Posted April 15th, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 1562 Page Views
Registration is now open for NERCOMP's May 5th workshop: "Assessment into Action."  See http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5734 for the full schedule and registration information.

Registration open for NERCOMP workshop "Assessment into Action"

Posted April 15th, 2009 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 1562 Page Views
Registration is now open for NERCOMP's May 5th workshop: "Assessment into Action."  See http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5734 for the full schedule and registration information.

Can We Promote Experimentation and Innovation in Learning as well as Accountability? Interview with Terrel Rhodes

Posted March 15th, 2009 by Randy Bass, Georgetown University
0 Comments | 5523 Page Views
Faculty often fear that “assessment” will have a reductive effect, either by reducing the rich complexity of teaching and learning to simplistic metrics, or by limiting what’s being measured. Student learning in new media environments seems particularly difficult to reconcile with traditional assessment tools.

In this interview, Terrel Rhodes, director of the VALUE project, describes the process of creating metarubrics that provide flexible criteria for making valid judgments about student work, resulting in frameworks tailored to local contexts but calibrated to “Essential Learning Outcomes.”

Can We Promote Experimentation and Innovation in Learning as well as Accountability? Interview with Terrel Rhodes

Posted March 15th, 2009 by Randy Bass, Georgetown University
0 Comments | 5523 Page Views
Faculty often fear that “assessment” will have a reductive effect, either by reducing the rich complexity of teaching and learning to simplistic metrics, or by limiting what’s being measured. Student learning in new media environments seems particularly difficult to reconcile with traditional assessment tools.

In this interview, Terrel Rhodes, director of the VALUE project, describes the process of creating metarubrics that provide flexible criteria for making valid judgments about student work, resulting in frameworks tailored to local contexts but calibrated to “Essential Learning Outcomes.”

The 2009 Galway Symposium

Posted March 13th, 2009 by Iain MacLaren, National University of Ireland, Galway
0 Comments | 1623 Page Views

Now in its 7th year, the Galway Symposium on Higher Education is becoming a landmark on the Irish and European higher education calendar. This year the title is "Design for Learning: Curriculum and Assessment in Higher Education."  Details at http://designforlearning.eventbrite.com/ .

Multimedia in the Classroom at USC: A Ten Year Perspective

Posted February 9th, 2009 by Mark E. Kann, University of Southern California
0 Comments | 8206 Page Views
Does multimedia scholarship add academic value to a liberal arts education? How do we know? Looking back at the history of the Honors Program in Multimedia Scholarship at USC, Mark Kann draws on his own teaching experience, discussions with other faculty members, and the university’s curriculum review process to explore these questions. He describes the process of developing the program’s academic objectives and assessment criteria, and the challenges of gathering evidence for his intuitions about the effects of multimedia scholarship. Finally, Kann reports on the program’s first student cohort and looks ahead to the future of multimedia at USC.

From Looking to Seeing: Student Learning in the Visual Turn

Posted January 18th, 2009 by David Jaffee, Bard Graduate Center
0 Comments | 6902 Page Views
Rather than simply using primary source images as illustrations for his course on Power, Race, and Culture in the U.S. City, David Jaffee wanted to teach his students how to interpret visual texts as a historian would. By paying close attention to his students’ readings of images, Jaffee was able to develop ways to scaffold their analysis, teaching them how to move beyond “looking” at isolated images to “seeing” historical context, connection and complexity.

Trace Evidence: How New Media Can Change What We Know About Student Learning

Posted January 18th, 2009 by Lynne Adrian, University of Alabama
0 Comments | 4910 Page Views
Clicker technology, often used in large-enrollment science courses, works well when every question has a single right answer. Lynne Adrian wanted to find out whether clickers could be used in disciplines which raise more questions than answers, and how illuminating the gray areas between “right” and “wrong” could help her students think critically about American studies. She found that the technology allowed her to preserve traces of the otherwise ephemeral class discussions, enabling her to analyze the types of questions she was asking in class and to track their effects on students’ written work throughout the semester.

Producing Audiovisual Knowledge: Documentary Video Production and Student Learning in the American Studies Classroom

Posted January 18th, 2009 by Bernie Cook, Georgetown University
0 Comments | 8431 Page Views
Traditionally, academic institutions have segregated multimedia production from disciplinary study. Bernie Cook wondered what his American Studies students would learn from working collaboratively to produce documentary films based on primary sources, and what he in turn might find out about their learning in the process. Students created documentary films on local history, and wrote reflections on their creative and critical process. Not only did students report tremendous engagement with the topics and sources for their projects, they also indicated satisfaction at being able to screen their work for an audience. By allowing his students to become producers of content, Cook enables them to participate fully in the intellectual work of American Studies and Film Studies.

New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Brief Introduction to this Issue of Academic Commons

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Randy Bass, Georgetown University
0 Comments | 7710 Page Views
How might we merge a culture of inquiry into teaching and learning with a culture of experimentation around new media technologies? In this issue of Academic Commons we look at the possibilities for building knowledge around teaching and learning in a rapidly changing technological landscape. We take these questions up in the context of a dual challenge: to understand better the changing nature of learning with new media, and the potential of new media environments to make learning--and faculty insights into teaching--visible and usable.

Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon
0 Comments | 13676 Page Views
This is a portrait of the new shape of learning with digital media, drawn around three core concepts: adaptive expertise, embodied learning, and socially situated pedagogies. These findings emerge from the classroom case studies of the Visible Knowledge Project, a six-year project engaging almost 70 faculty from 21 different institutions across higher education. Examining the scholarly work of VKP faculty across practices and technologies, it highlights key conceptual findings and their implications for pedagogical design.  Where any single classroom case study yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a framework that bridges from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 technologies, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been undervalued if not invisible in higher education.

Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning (Part II)

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon
0 Comments | 3180 Page Views
What endures about the work from the Visible Knowledge Project are the insights about teaching and learning that bridge from Web 1.0 technologies to Web 2.0. These insights emerged from the work in VKP by looking across practices and beyond specific technologies and sometimes the technology itself. These insights include findings that are conceptual and bear on pedagogical designs. Where any one of the classroom case studies yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a picture of new learning, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been invisible or undervalued in higher education.  (Part II of III)

Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning (Part III)

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon
0 Comments | 3198 Page Views
What endures about the work from the Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) are the insights about teaching and learning that bridge from Web 1.0 technologies to Web 2.0. These insights emerged from the work in VKP by looking across practices and beyond specific technologies and sometimes the technology itself. These insights include findings that are conceptual and bear on pedagogical designs. Where any single classroom case study yields a snapshot of practice and insight, collectively these studies present a picture of new learning, building on many dimensions of learning that have previously been invisible or undervalued in higher education. (Part III of III)

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University
2 Comments | 50105 Page Views
“This is a social revolution, not a technological one,” says Michael Wesch, “and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.” Looking at higher education as a whole, as well as his own teaching, Michael Wesch argues that we have had our "why's," "what's" and "how's" of teaching and learning turned upside down, and that the most compelling consequence of this moment is that it has sent us into a new "question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment." 

Making Common Cause: Electronic Portfolios, Learning, and the Power of Community

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Kathleen Yancey, Barbara Cambridge and Darren Cambridge
3 Comments | 8400 Page Views
What impact are electronic portfolios having in higher education? In Electronic Portfolio 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact, contributors from diverse institutions of higher education in sites across two continents share their research on electronic portfolios. In an excerpt from the conclusion to that volume, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Barbara Cambridge, and Darren Cambridge consider how electronic portfolios provide a vehicle for a transition into the future of higher education.

Focusing on Process: Exploring Participatory Strategies to Enhance Student Learning

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Juan-José Gutiérrez, California State University, Monterey Bay
0 Comments | 4416 Page Views
Confronting the challenge of improving student writing in a large sociology class, Juan José Gutiérrez developed a software-based peer review process. He required students to evaluate one another's papers based on specific criteria and to provide constructive feedback. He found that not only did this process help with the logistics of paper-grading, but it also allowed him to adapt his teaching to address specific concerns indicated by qualitative and quantitative analysis of the peer reviews. 

Theorizing Through Digital Stories: The Art of "Writing Back" and "Writing For"

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Rina Benmayor, California State University, Monterey Bay
0 Comments | 7015 Page Views
Discovering how digital stories engage students in critical, theoretical frameworks lives at the center of Rina Benmayor's work. Through her course, Latina Life Stories, Rina asked each student to tell his or her own life story digitally and then situate the story within a theoretical context. While this process engaged students to theorize creatively, it also allowed her to document methods to recognize the quality of student work resulting in a flexible and intuitive rubric to use beyond this experience.

Video Killed the Term Paper Star? Two Views

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Peter Burkholder and Anne Cross
0 Comments | 4008 Page Views
Two instructors from separate disciplines discuss what happens when alternative multimedia assignments replace traditional papers. Peter Burkholder found the level of engagement to change dramatically in his history courses while Anne Cross experienced new avenues for talking about sensitive subjects in sociology. Together, both professors explore the advantages and opportunities for video assignments that challenge students to synthesize information in critical and innovative ways.

“It Helped Me See a New Me”: ePortfolio, Learning and Change at LaGuardia Community College

Posted January 7th, 2009 by Bret Eynon, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
1 Comments | 9283 Page Views
What happens if we shift the focus of our teaching and learning innovations from a single classroom to an entire institution? What new kinds of questions and possibilities emerge? Can an entire college break boundaries, moving from a focus on “what teachers teach” to a focus on “what students learn?” Can we think differently about student learning if we create structures that enable thousands of students to use new media tools to examine their learning across courses, disciplines, and semesters? Bret Eynon explores these questions as he analyzes the college-wide ePortfolio initiative at LaGuardia Community College. Studying individual portfolios and focus group interviews, he also examines quantitative outcomes data on engagement and retention to better consider ePortfolio’s impact on student learning.

NERCOMP Event: Supporting Data Analysis Across the Curriculum

Posted April 16th, 2008 by lisagatesphd@gm...
0 Comments | 2133 Page Views
Registration open for the April 28th NERCOMP SIG "Supporting Data Analysis Across the Curriculum." For more information and to register, go to http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=1414.

Cyberinfrastructure: Leveraging Change at our Institutions. An interview with James J. O'Donnell

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture
0 Comments | 6127 Page Views
Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word, is fascinated by how "institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding us through the texture of change since the Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that incremental change is perhaps the best we can do until the fundamental instruments of scholarly communication and the academic reward structure change: "until the problem we have to solve is defined persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it."

Open Source Software Tools: Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration

Posted December 11th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture
0 Comments | 3101 Page Views

Tim Berners-Lee presented the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) yesterday at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). $650,000 in prize money went to 10 nonprofits for "leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities."

While more information is available on the CNI site, the winners are as follows:

  • American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY: www.movingimage.us) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org) [$100,000].
  • Duke University (Durham, NC: www.duke.edu) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org)[$100,000].
  • Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz) for leadership and development work on several open source projects including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (http://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/) [$100,000].
  • Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: www.georgialibraries.org) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org) [$50,000].
  • Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT: www.middlebury.edu) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system [$50,000].
  • Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA: www.participatoryculture.org) for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com) [$50,000].
  • Talboks-och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden: www.tpb.se) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired [$50,000].
  • University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL: www.illinois.edu): one award for the development and release of the Firefox Accessibility Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1891) [$50,000]; and one award for the development and release of the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project (www.openEAI.org) [$50,000].
  • University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca) [$50,000].



 

 

George Siemens at the ODCE 2007 Conference

Posted April 24th, 2007 by Mark Cubberley, Wright State University-Lake Campus
0 Comments | 7398 Page Views

"When you look at knowledge as the central aspect, or the central product of education today, it would suggest that if knowledge itself changes significantly or substantially, that we also would need to consider the framework and the design of the organizations that we use to create, disseminate, share, evaluate that knowledge." 

George Siemens, author of Knowing Knowledge, Associate Director of Research and Development with the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba, and founder and President of Complexive Systems Inc., was the keynote speaker at the Ohio Digital Commons for Education Conference in Columbus, Ohio (March 4-6).

In this address, Siemens shared some of his thoughts on knowledge and technology and their implications for educational organizations.

Assessing Learning Objects: The Importance of Values, Purpose and Design

Posted February 8th, 2007 by Diane J. Goldsmith, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
1 Comments | 10107 Page Views
Despite claims that "the learning object is dead," learning object repositories continue to grow. But how do we measure the success of a learning object?  Diane Goldsmith provides her own clear and comprehensive "assessment" of the problem.

Assessing Learning Objects: The Importance of Values, Purpose and Design

Posted February 8th, 2007 by Diane J. Goldsmith, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
1 Comments | 10107 Page Views
Despite claims that "the learning object is dead," learning object repositories continue to grow. But how do we measure the success of a learning object?  Diane Goldsmith provides her own clear and comprehensive "assessment" of the problem.

Review of "Connecting Technology & Liberal Education: Theories and Case Studies" A NERCOMP event (4/5/06)

Posted September 26th, 2006 by Shel Sax, Middlebury College
0 Comments | 4763 Page Views
Shel offers this take on a workshop looking at a very broad topic which offered a slight twist as far as NERCOMP workshops go: all of the presenters came from an academic background rather than a technological one. Says Shel, “My interest in the interaction of technology and pedagogy was well met by presentations combining strategic thinking about what constitutes and shapes a liberal arts education and examples of technology being used in the classroom in a traditionally ‘liberal’ manner.”

Cyberinfrastructure = Hardware + Software + Bandwidth + People

Posted September 25th, 2006 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College
0 Comments | 4532 Page Views
At the October 27, 2005 NERCOMP meeting entitled "Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished," Leo Hill, Leslie Hitch, and Glenn Pierce from Northeastern University gave a presentation about how they planned for and implemented a university computer cluster that serves the research agendas of a wide array of Northeastern's faculty. At the October 27, 2005 NERCOMP meeting entitled “Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished,” Leo Hill, Leslie Hitch and Glenn Pierce from Northeastern University gave a presentation about how they planned for and implemented a university computer cluster that serves the research agendas of a wide array of Northeastern’s faculty. Mike Roy attended the meeting and lets us know about some some of the exciting outcomes--and repercussions--of a campus-wide (and perhaps nationwide) change in attitudes and support for the idea that IT-supported research can fundamentally change for the better how we conduct research and eventually how we educate our students.

Digitized Audio Commentary in First Year Writing Classes

Posted August 16th, 2006 by Susan Sipple, University of Cincinnati Raymond Walters College
0 Comments | 9929 Page Views
Sue Sipple shares her experience with providing digitized audio commentary; she says, “The results have convinced me that audio instructor commentary on student writing is received more positively by college composition students and leads them toward more substantive revision of their essays.

Three Stars and a Chili Pepper: Social Software, Folksonomy, and User Reviews in the College Context

Posted June 9th, 2006 by Joseph Ugoretz, Macaulay Honors College--CUNY
2 Comments | 18378 Page Views
Joe Ugoretz discusses how a new group of internet tools--Google, Wikis, Flickr and others included in the family of social software”--provide new methods of creating, sharing, categorizing, accessing and critiquing content, while lacking a central authority or a hierarchy of editorial control. Joe presents some suggestions “for how we, in the academic world, the college context, can use these tools to the advantage of our teaching and our students’ learning.”

Adventus Internetus and the Anaerobic Soul

Posted June 9th, 2006 by Stephen Healey, University of Bridgeport
2 Comments | 5801 Page Views
Stephen Healey offers a “jeremiad” against the Internet—or does he?

Looking at Learning, Looking Together

Posted March 26th, 2006 by Joseph Ugoretz, Macaulay Honors College--CUNY
0 Comments | 2704 Page Views
Link: 
http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/vkp/dportfolio
With the support of the Visible Knowledge Project and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, two faculty from the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) have developed a website which documents student learning, as well as collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning--using the web as a medium to publish the process as well as the conclusions of their research into student-created digital storytelling projects.

Faculty as Authors of Online Courses: Support and Mentoring

Posted December 12th, 2005 by Deborah Cotler and Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Monmouth University
0 Comments | 16632 Page Views
Echoing Balsamo and Schilling, Gail Matthews-DeNatale and Deborah Cotler argue that online course authorship requires faculty to develop a new skill set. "Our current challenge is to ensure the development of online learning that engages learners in the open-ended, inquiry-based learning that we believe is at the heart of a liberal arts education. We are finding that excellent professors whose face-to-face teaching is grounded in a liberal arts approach to learning may sometimes encounter difficulties when they take their teaching into the digital realm."

TK3: A Tool to (Re)Compose

Posted December 10th, 2005 by Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California
0 Comments | 8233 Page Views

Virginia Kuhn admits that she's slightly biased, but she provides a glowing review of what she calls "a program that allows writers to both theorize and enact the types of literacies necessary for life in the 21st-century, wired world." We include a TK3 version of the review, and a link to download a free TK3 reader so that AC readers can see for themselves!

Incorporating Blogging in a Free Speech Course: Lessons Learned

Posted December 10th, 2005 by David Reichard, California State University Monterey Bay
0 Comments | 9318 Page Views
David Reichard, like S. Raj Chaudhury, a CASTL (Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) Scholar, has carefully studied the effects of incorporating blogging in his "Free Speech and Responsibility" course. Not only did students blog, but they wrote essays analyzing their own and other students’ blogs: "These essays provided invaluable 'meta' analysis of student learning in the course. Significantly, students described blogs as providing a public record of their own learning, making their process as learners visible to themselves and others."

Interactive Engagement with Classroom Response Systems

Posted December 10th, 2005 by S. Raj Chaudhury, Christopher Newport University
0 Comments | 12671 Page Views
S. Raj Chaudhury shares his experiences using clickers in large introductory science courses. Even though such courses often emphasize "finding the right answer," Chaudhury discusses how he uses the system "principally to generate discussion among students and to engender a sense of shared inquiry, where the assessment data is shared in real-time by the students and the instructor." Such an approach is applicable across many disciplines – wherever lectures can be more interactive.

Learning Outcomes Related to the Use of Personal Response Systems in Large Science Courses

Posted December 9th, 2005 by Jolee West, Wesleyan University
0 Comments | 11100 Page Views
Jolee West presents a round-up of the findings of the current studies and articles written on clickers and personal response systems.