Delivering computerized assessments safely and securely.

Monday's issue of The eLearning Developers' Journal will feature an article by Eric Shepherd, containing best practices and guidelines for computer-based assessment. Shepherd writes:

Security is a pressing concern for organizations using computer-based assessments, but so is cost-effectiveness. It's essential to maintain the integrity of item pools, keep test scores secure and minimize the possibility for cheating -- but without an exorbitant price tag. The thoughtful use of technology, combined with careful consideration of an assessment's purpose and consequences, makes it possible to deliver assessments safely, securely, and economically.

Join the eLearning Guild first. Then read the article to learn how to improve your assessment practices.

10:16:46 AM    

Synchronous CMS compared.

This is a great reference. Compares commercial systems and Moodle (open source, I think). I want to do a chart from this information, maybe it would make it easier to use and a little more objective.

DEOS-L: Blackboard, WebCT and Moodle.

Here's a very interesting DEOS-L post talking about WebCT, BlackBoard & Moodle... guess which comes out on top... [via Serious Instructional Technology]

[incorporated subversion]

UPDATE (10/23/03):

Scott Leslie (EdTechPost) advises:  Bill, in regards to comparing Moodle with BB and WebCT, for what it's worth you can view a comparison at http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/compare.jsp?product=182,144,176

On the surface Moodle stacks up pretty well, though I think on digging deeper a few concerns might come up (one major one would be that since it is PHP-based, scalability might be an issue for large - 10,000 users+ - installs).

Thanks, Scott! Since you pointed that out, I have found several dozen interesting comparison/commentary entries by doing a Google search on webct vs moodle. (Blackboard vs moodle turns up a subset of webct vs moodle, so there's not much point doing both.)

12:02:00 PM    

Continuing the conversation about communities and courses.

Elearnspace's thoughts on communities / courses.

"...In my opinion, the solution lies in well-designed communities and networks." [elearnspace blog]

Some good dot points here. Am enjoying this discussion!

11:55:46 AM    

Content Management Technology.

An issue for faculty and for anyone who provides distance education via the web or internet, whether synchronous or asynchronous. The tools are still too complicated for most people other than specialists. It needs to take less time and attention to use the tools. Only then are we going to make progress.

Basic Strategy for Providing Faculty Web Presence. Dan Mitchell at DeAnza College adds another nugget to this day of highly relevant posts in my aggregator:

A basic and easy web-based content-management system is a first priority. Most faculty members simply need to create a few web pages that can quickly and easily be updated, and possibly post some other file types for downloading. Frontier from Userland (and its Manila component) is the one I am most familiar with. Yes, it is a "blogging" tool, but it does a lot more than that, and I can vouch for the ease with which faculty can adopt this solution.

11:50:35 AM    

Interoperable Metadata.

Two Paths to Interoperable Metadata.

http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/
archive/2003/godby-dc2003.pdf

It used to seem that the problem we had was not having enough metadata. Now it is becoming clearer that not only do we have a lot of existing metadata, we have a lot of competing metadata standards and schemas - different ways of describing what are either the same or similar objects.

This paper, presented at the recent 2003 Dublin Core conference, proposes one (in fact two) model to translate between this proliferation of schemas in order to present users with a unified search interface to diverse collections tagged with different metadata schema.

11:46:40 AM    

Confused by RSS? Don't know what a "feed" is?

Don't despair. Check out this post via Roland Tanglao.

Chris Sells - What is an RSS Feed?. (SOURCE:The Sells Spout)- Nice, gentle intro.  My favourite RSS readers are Radio and NetNewsWire.  For non techies, though, I recommend Bloglines.

QUOTE

While RSS is fairly unreadable for normal humans, computers eat it up. For example, if you read the RSS feed from my site on a regular basis, whenever I make a new post, youll see a new entry in the RSS feed. RSS feeds aren't useful for you, but when fed to an RSS reader program, you can keep up to date on literally hundreds of web sites without having to browse to them manually. The RSS reader will check each RSS feed to which you subscribe, letting you know when something new on a web site has happened and showing you what it is, giving you the option to follow up or ignore the new thing. Thousands of sites have RSS feeds, letting me keep up on a bunch of things:

• My friends' writings
• Global and financial news
• People talking about topics of interest to me, like my favorite technologies or my latest book
• My favorite comics strips (I need my daily Dilbert!)
• The latest product and articles releases from Microsoft
• Practically anything else I care about on a regular basis

I keep up on all of this without ever visiting the web sites themselves them til something of interest catches my eye.

There are a bunch of RSS readers in the world, but my favorite is SharpReader. If you install this program and start it up, SR will check all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to on a regular basis in the background while you work, notifying you of something new by changing its icon from blue to yellow. If you decide to install SharpReader, your next stop should be NewsIsFree.com, where you'll find all kinds of RSS feeds in any number of categories. After subscribing to a few of those, you'll want to stop by Tapestry, where you can find RSS feeds for tons of daily comic strips. If you want to get fancy, you can go to GoogleAlert, where you can subscribe to searches so that whenever Google finds something new on your search topic, your RSS reader will let you know.

If you find the ability to track hundreds of web sites without surfing to each of them manually, RSS is for you. If you find my instructions intimidating, ask a computer friend to help you out (I'll be home for Christmas, Mom).

UNQUOTE

10:46:23 AM    

Thanks ...

... to Jeremy Hiebert, Scott Leslie, and James Farmer for their help in getting me the right URL to subscribe to the RSS feed for Jeremy's great weblog to my Radio aggregator.

Bill

10:29:40 AM    

Last Things First: The Power of Backward Chaining

Everyone has heard of the Learning Curve, but simply producing e-Learning that efficiently helps learners up that slippery slope isn't good enough. To be effective, e-Learning must also defeat the Learning Curve's evil twin, the Forgetting Curve. And it's not like the Forgetting Curve waits politely to start its work until after the e-Learning is over.

There is a simple technique for making sure that e-Learning also reduces forgetting.  Read this week's eLearning Developer's Journal to find out what "it" is.

10:06:49 PM    

Jeremy goes exploring and finds an interesting parallel universe of education bloggers... feels like a 'contact' moment :o) I had a play around and particularly liked the look of Brian's Education "a libertarian-inclined education blog run by Brian Micklethwait". Can see that there are some cross-links there to stuff I read too... a fun find!

[incorporated subversion]

I enjoy reading Jeremy's weblog, but I have to track the entries manually -- can't find the RSS feed!

Another feature of formal education that is missing from communities is the idea of review. Review by peers or by credentialed authority. Not that peers and credentialed authority are always right (look at Galileo's experience), but they are known and accountable.

I don't think it's "either/or" with formal education and communities. Both have their place. The challenge at the moment is to figure out the relationship between them. Communities sometimes figure things out ahead of the formal structure, but they have a hard time testing the ideas and challenges sometimes turn into shouting matches. Formal institutions can debate and test, but they aren't fast and they often have blinders of their own. Communities and formal institutions both have plenty of opportunity to put on gnostic airs, too: We know something the rest of you don't know, and we're not telling unless you know the secret handshake. Brrrr.

Got to head for the hospital again. More later.

9:56:40 AM    

Learning communities (again).

Learning: communities vs. courses.

There is an interesting post by George Siemens and follow-up discussion on learning communities vs. courses. I guess  it reflects well educator's frustrations about courses and fascination by communities.

Why communities are not good? Communities are nightmares for novices: lack of clear roles or structures, overflow of information, discussions that you join in a middle, strange language... Communities could be good to stay updated in the field or get specific questions answered, but they are hell if you want to get solid understanding of the domain. Communities are difficult for those who are not self-directed learners yet or choose not to be self-directed in specific context (I believe in the right to choose not to be self-directed :) And finally, to learn in a community, you have to be open for unexpected opportunities to learn (see related thoughts about not learning in a community).

Why courses are good? Good course instructors take into account learners needs and level of being (choosing to be) self-directed and provide guidance that makes our path through learning exciting and efficient. Courses provide context that makes us more 'disciplined' then we would be by ourselves: pushing to learn things we would never consider important, doing assignments to articulate silent ideas or connect loose ends, initiating brainstormings that should lead to some tangible results and not only random thoughts. Courses provide structure to make learning about complex things easier. Finally, good courses develop our abilities to become self-directed learners.

I believe that both courses and communities (and other forms to support learning) provide good conditions for learning in some  cases. The problem is that we don't know much what are those cases and how learners and those who facilitate learning can make good choices for combining different environments for learning. Effective learners are developing their own (often unconscious) strategies to make these choices, but I haven't seen much research on it.

I would explain lack of research in this area by two factors. First, the scale and importance of informal learning are quite recent discoveries (as far as I know from 1979 study of Allen Tough on personal learning projects). Second, the focus of most thinking about learning: educational institutions and companies think in terms of activities or environments that support learning of many. In this case even when learners' needs and preferences are taken into account they result in events and programs optimised to help learning of many at the same time, rather than to optimise learning of one person across different contexts.

Related reading: Jay Cross: The Other 80% for an overview on informal learning.

Some of my posts: formal vs. informal learning, Supporting informal learning, Virtual communities as learning networks, Bricolage learning and longer story on synergies between formal and informal learning.

[Mathemagenic]

Problems with learning communities: 1. Accountability: with formal instruction, someone is accountable for results; and 2. Bad information drives out good.

In this week's article in The eLearning Developers' Journal, I point out the problems with the default learning progression that learning communities support (as well as subject matter experts, schools, and traditional learning designers). It comes down to this -- what everyone thinks is the only way to learn often is the worst way to learn.

I'm not against the idea of learning communities, and I do agree that a lot of learning is done informally. But I also point out the validity of Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crud." Much of what is learned informally is wrong, and there is no easy way to correct it. If the Internet and the Web are an example of a very large learning community, take a look at Snopes to get an idea of the huge amount of mis-information that people in the community are learning (if they believe it and act on it, they have learned it). And no one is accountable for the mistakes and their cost.

Sorry, this is a sketchy reaction, and is bound to be misunderstood. I'm just terribly distracted by having to deal with my father's health problems. I'll try to come back later and clarify my horribly negative remarks.

12:24:32 PM