Dates / Location

September 20-21 (Mon-Tue), 2010

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, CA.

Map

Jump to meeting notes and outcomes

Resources

Add your list of readings, presentations, videos relevant to the conversation on the assessment resources page. 

Participants

Have a look at the current participant list and feel free to add more about yourself and your work!

Overarching goals of the workshop

Over the course of the event, we would like to develop two or three fleshed-out plans for action which:

1. Enable assessment of specific skills of interest (most likely "soft skills" rather than technical proficiency),
2. Leverage existing Internet-based systems for reputation-building and assessment, and
3. Show promise for implementation in the peer-oriented P2PU environment as well as other virtual learning communities.

Help us build the agenda

The P2PU Assessment Workshop will bring together 20 participants working in a range of disciplines and contexts related to assessment modeling.

We invite each of you to view the meeting as opportunity to both share what you are working on, while simultaneously tapping the knowledge and experience of this excellent group. Our hope is that our time together will generate not only some concrete ideas and plans, but will also lead to increased collaboration across the networks represented by those present.

Please add your thoughts to the Proposed Sessions page (or just email us directly), in part by reflecting on these questions:

• What are some of the new tools and mechanisms that are emerging on the open web, which are not currently conceptualized in the context of assessing learning?
• What are things that we weren't able (or willing) to easily assess in the past -- the so-called soft skills -- that we might be able to better assess now with these new techniques?
• What are the biggest challenges in advancing the field of internet-based learning assessment, and how might we collectively address the same?

Schedule

While the agenda will be somewhat fluid in response to the pace of collaboration and conversation, the Draft Workshop Schedule provides an overview of how we anticipate spending the 2 days.

Possible workshop activities and outcomes

• A -- Tools, technologies, and techniques for assessment: Annotated review of different Internet-based systems for reputation-building and assessment, with special consideration of their potential for use in P2PU and other virtual community learning environments.
• B -- New ways of identifying skills that are relevant within specific communities: Detailed examination of mechanisms for identification of desirable skills, as determined for example by online and direct surveys in communities of interest, or textual analysis of job adverts and recommendations.
• C -- Combining A and B to design new models for assessment of relevant skills: Identification of possible mechanisms for evaluating the skills in a manner which capitalizes on existing tools and the peer-oriented P2PU environment as well as other virtual learning communities.
• D -- Web 2.0 research meets assessment: Pathways to recruitment of collaborators from within and beyond the educational research field who are interested in further research, development, and evaluation of these systems.

Additional possible activities

• Building a prototype: Specific recommendations for analyzing the efficacy of the existing assessments of  key skills which are embedded in the Fall suite of P2PU School of  Webcraft courses.
• We could also look ahead to future semesters and  develop templates for identifying relevant skills, implementing key assessments, and evaluating their utility and impact.
• These efforts are precursors to conversations about accreditation, including badge systems, personal portfolios, and so on. We may have time to consider the connections between assessment and accreditation for online learning environments.
• Though our focus here is on online learning, we believe that the issues at hand transcend learning contexts, and we might be able to consider ways of building formal/informal or physical/virtual collaborations among people and institutions.