While technology brought disruptive change in many industries, education is only now hovering at the brink of deep and fundamental changes. Open Education and online education challenge the traditional bricks and mortar institution and several forces are driving disaggregation and democratization of the entire educational value chain. A learner now can take a course taught by Yale professors from the comfort of his living room in a remote part of the world. While much has changed, one significant problem of education, assessment needs to be reinvented.
While it is generally agreed that grades are poor predictors for success in a career, traditional assessment and grades still influence teaching and learning. Employers have consistently stated that rather than grades, they define soft-skills as the most desirable attributes of a candidate. Why not train, document and report on soft-skills?
In this session Preetha Ram will describe a strategy for reporting on three soft-skills that users have demonstrated on a social learning site, OpenStudy: teamwork, problem solving and engagement Evaluation is performed through a combination of system wide usage analytics data combined with crowd-sourced validation of skills. These evaluation heuristics are a sharp departure from the traditional model of using quizzes and grades for assessment, their focus on real-time demonstration of skills comes at a time when many in education are questioning the value of grades.
This session will be held in the parallel track on “Strategies for managing open innovation in learning and teaching” on Day 1 of the conference (A detailed programme will soon be published on: http://eif.efquel.org/programme/ )
Workshop presenters: Preetha Ram (OpenStudy), Anke Mulder (OpenCourseWare Consortium), Alastair Creelman (Linnaeus University)
About Preetha Ram
Preetha Ram is a co-founder, Dean for Education and Chief Marketing Officer for OpenStudy. In addition to these awesome responsibilities that she embraces with ease and enthusiasm, she is currently on leave from her position as Associate Dean for Pre-Health and Science Education at Emory College and co-director of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. She received her BS from the Women’s Christian College in Chennai, India, her MS from the Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi, India, and her PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from Yale University and also holds an Executive MBA from Emory’s Goizueta School of Business. She loves a good book, travelling and is positive that she was an Italian in her previous life.
About Anke Mulder
Anka Mulder, M.A. serves as the president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. While providing an international voice for the organization, Mulder provides leadership direction from her native country The Netherlands. She will offer her strategic vision to assist in the growth of the Consortium and help build awareness for the global OpenCourseWare movement.
Mulder is currently the Secretary General and Director of Education and Student Affairs at Delft University of Technology. As Secretary General she is responsible for the management and steering of the policy agenda of Board of Directors of the University. As Director of Education she is responsible for the university’s educational strategy and policies and student facilities. Mulder is involved with implementing projects related to educational innovation, including the initiation of an opencourseware project for the university. She oversees the program, ensures the adoption of movement within the school, administers the internal and external communications of the program and helps define the university’s future strategy with the OpenCourseWare movement.
