Continuing the subject I ended with last time (“What is college for?”), traditional answers to that question include: College is a time for intellectual exploration (and even indulgence) College offers young people a rite of passage between the end of adolescence and young adulthood Completion of a college degree provides a credential that can be [...]
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College Credit by Exam
Continuing the discussion of how to make online learning count towards actual degree credits, the ACE accreditation service I described yesterday provides colleges and universities the means to judge whether a course taken by one institution (or taken online) is equivalent to a course taken locally. And as I mentioned in that posting, ACE approves [...]
ACEing College
One of things that motivated me to blog about this subject was a recognition that that the conversation about the MOOC phenomenon seemed to be getting ahead of itself, with too much discussion of how MOOCs might replace traditional college informed by too little end-user experience regarding the actual level of learning associated with taking [...]
Doing MOOCs Right
Some of the observations I’ve made over the last few weeks with regard to many free classes I’ve been taking being easier to complete than equivalent classes I remember from college needs to be tempered by a couple of critical points. First, not all open classes are equivalent in terms of their mission or required [...]
Odds and Ends and Sophomore Year
Starting with some housekeeping: First, welcome all you Boston Globe readers out there. If you’re interested in getting the skinny on this project, you can start by reading my first post which introduced what’s behind this experiment in extreme learning. And anyone who wants to follow my progress can subscribe to the weekly newsletter by [...]
MOOC Testing – Final Thoughts
So the good news is that massive courses have the technology and the audience needed to generate massive (or “Big”) data, enough data to give course developers the statistics they need to refine and revise testing so that it more capably screens those who know from those who don’t. And, if combined with some of [...]
MOOC Testing and Big Data
I hope I’ve not lost too many people as this week’s series dove into some of the more technical aspects of testing. It’s just that, having spent so many years in both the professional testing and education industries, it struck me how some of the principles of the former could really improve the quality of [...]
Testing – Asking the Right Questions
The huge enrollments in massive open courses requires automation of as many aspects of the teaching process as possible, which is why machine-scored testing will likely be part of the MOOC “package,” even if what the machine can score becomes more sophisticated over the coming months and years. But since the one thing we can [...]
Testing – Best Practices
Most test development begins and ends with the writing of test questions. For instance, a teacher preparing a quiz or exam for his or her students usually starts not from the type of statistically validated test plan described in the previous post (the type of test plan created to drive development of a content-valid standardized [...]
Testing – Plan Ahead
Over the next few of days, I’m going to see how far we can get covering the entire professional test development process and showing how these steps can inform the creation of more accurate and challenging assessments for MOOCs and similar high-scale learning programs. Those interested in more in-depth coverage of this subject can check [...]
