Assessment is crucial in competency based programs because, absent the time structure of a face to face class, two things must be present. First, the program structure must be clearly planned in advance, and students must have a way to progress when they have achieved competence in a particular learning goal. Second, there must be a way to assess a student’s achievement of a particular competency and also to report that success to some sort of accrediting system (like the student system for grades).

While there are systems that do all of these tasks, there is not a standard language that each can use to communicate. There currently is no way for learning  management systems to understand the competency structures of one another, or for automated progression through competencies, our for the grading of the  competencies to be meaningfully tracked (meaning, the systems largely do not provide data beyond whether a student passed an assignment — data that could be used to improve student learning outcomes).

I was very interested to see that a standard may be emerging to fill this very gap of a standard for assessment data. IMS Global, a consortium focusing on learning technology standards recently announced their “Caliper” framework for “learning analytics interoperability.”

The issue of growing concern is that the collecting and sharing of data across disparate systems is a real challenge for faculty, administrators and IT leaders. The need for data sharing between applications, platforms and content is vital in order for institutions to evolve learning analytics to improve learner success.

Unfortunately, the details of the standard will not emerge until a demonstration in May, 2014.

One of the thought leaders on learning management systems, Michael Feldstein, sees Caliper as the “learning management operating system” (LMOS). He describes:

an LMOS service broker would have different adapters to accept data from different kinds of learning applications and pass that data to whatever other apps needed it. These adaptors would ideally be standards-based so that it would be easy to plug in new applications from different sources.

He then goes into describe in fairly technical detail how Caliper might solve some of the complexities of sharing data among systems that define their data in different ways.

…what Caliper adds to a triple structure. It adds a collection of ‘entities,’ or things, that all interoperating computers agree have certain properties. And that, my friends, is what makes time travel work. With both a grammar and a lexicon, learning applications can start talking to each other.

Both Feldstein and IMS Global give specific focus to how Caliper might solve the needs for learning analytics, but I agree that it might rise to the level of the organizing “operating system” of learning. While analytics offer a powerful way to use data to help instructors and students improve their learning,  I hope that Caliper might help to bring what Feldstein calls “a more unified learning experience.”

I believe students, instructors, and administrators all have needs for connecting the data from the various systems that they use to teach and learn — especially for assessment or certification. Instructors might appreciate the ability to use the tools that fit their teaching needs, students appreciate the convenience of a unified experience, and administrators might have a single source of data for institutional improvement and accreditation.

In case you can’t devote 15 minutes to watching, Hillis describes a special librarian who steered him towards new interests at a young age (I wish I had a Mrs. Wilner!). He asks the audience what it might be like if everyone could learn whatever they want, and to have a personalized guide to help one chart their learning. Hillis then describes an idea for organizing online materials to help individuals discover relevant and increasingly complex content, and ultimately to assessing their knowledge to guide future learning.

Hillis envisions the material laid out in a way that would make sense to a fourth grader — as an actual map, where one could see their way forward as well as past progress (he calls it “a map for my ignorance”).

Hillis ends on two topics that are near to my interests — assessment and standards. For example, he points out that assessment might help one who is new to a particular field figure out where to start based on their prior knowledge.

In looking at the open source standards to connect the pieces, he notes that LRMI (the Learning Metadata Resource Initiative …not sure how I haven’t blogged about that yet) might provide a framework for organizing existing online material.

In connecting an organizational strategy for the wide web of educational materials with a means to help one know the depth of their knowledge of a particular area, Hillis provides a path to more holistic learning that one could not gain from taking the occasional MOOC.

Perhaps traditional education institutions still have a role to play in the world Hillis describes. There would be much work to do, such as charting the map, creating assessments, and accrediting learning. Maybe a traditional residential education would still be valued for providing an environment where people can connect to walk through the map together. Or, perhaps there are problem solving skills that could not be learned through the knowledge of the map, and the (likely) automated assessments.

In any case, this is a vision for online learning that might be worth the decades of investment that it would take to implement. I hope to pick up the thread of standards — especially for assessment — in future posts.

Wearable technologies for fitness are all the rage. From the Nike Fuel band to the Fitbit, the constant tracking of activity and instant feedback motivates many to gradually increase their fitness. Unless Santa is bringing a surprise, I can’t claim firsthand experience on whether the technology can help people implement the changes they desire, but I wonder if it might be a model for education. While others have postulated what these fitness devices tell us about learning, I wonder if a similar device could be created for mental fitness.

While there are many apps that one use to bring learning on the go via smartphone (such as Lumosity or iTunes U), I don’t know of a wearable device that is designed to enhance mental fitness. There are a few educational models that might drive the design of such a device:

• Regular, repeated content delivery: distributed practice has been shown to be an effective way to bolster long term retention of newly learned material. Perhaps reminders on a wristwatch (or in something like Google Glass) delivered by an app that knew the optimal content, time, and modality could make routine memorization easier.
• Connection to real world events: the news can be a great way to find a meaningful connection with the issues of the day. While this is another take on the idea of distributed practice, it’s another way that one might develop the mental frameworks for learning.
• Mind games: simple recall games, like the ones from Lumosity, might help build build generalized mental fitness — much like wearable physical fitness devices!

Other than the difficulties of designing content for exceedingly small screens, I can anticipate one other hurdle to implementing wearable learning fitness technology. The device could not act on it’s own; it would need to connect to another system (or systems) to organize the subjects that one is studying.

There’s also the question of whether learning fitness is as marketable as physical fitness.

Yet, I still see the “path” as an important issue (one that, Sal Khan seems to understand), as most learners might not have the sensitivity to know the best next steps to take self-motivated learning. I certainly felt this way growing up. As much as I enjoyed reading or visiting museums, it was often very opportunistic. I went through a great many dry spells where I “didn’t know what to read next.”

I realize there is disagreement on this issue. For example, Hick writes about “Education 3.0“:

Pushing the idea further, this kind of “new curriculum” would not simply some abstract matter of curiosity and whimsy, where we throw out any and all learning goals and let students run about, but rather a redefining of what students “study”–goals based on the student, their history, their passions, and their networks and native geographical communities.

Here, the curriculum is authentically personalized, based on thinking and making (which is internal and intrinsic) rather than an ability to parrot a carefully choreographed “performance” (which is not).

Perhaps scholars like Neil Postman, or experiences teaching unmotivated undergraduates, have made me skeptical of a typical student’s ability to take the reins of their education. It’s also possible that I’m over-defending what seems to be an attack on higher education (where columnists like Friedman declare that technology is the savior to the ills of higher education).

As an educational technologists, I naturally believe that technology can enhance education. As a constructivist, I value a learner-centered approach. In the end, I think we should make a reasoned call to better define the strengths of a traditional, residential education — either to see how technology might enhance face-to-face learning, or to better understand the residential experience’s place in the new educational landscape. I still believe the idea of the learning “map” plays a key place in organ, and I hope to develop some thoughts about how it might reconcile