Venn diagram of when dreams come true

1. “Rubrics provide criteria for assessing students’ work. …Rubrics can be used to provide formative feedback to students, to grade students, and/or to assess courses and programs.”

2. There are two kinds of scoring for rubrics:

•  Holistic scoring = results in one overall score
• Analytic Rubrics = separate, holistic scoring of specified characteristics of a product or behavior

3. Rubrics can be useful to conduct program assessment or course assessment or General Education Assessment.

4. Rubrics can be calibrated between raters to insure inter-rater reliability for assessment.

• Have two people score independently and both scores are recorded
• Have pairs of readers collaborate to come up with a unified score
  Methodology:
•  Collect evidence and remove identifying information
•  Develop and pilot the rubric
• Select exemplars of student work that have a variety of quality – to include gamut of quality from terrible to excellent.
• Discuss how you will score and conduct sample scoring to discuss.
• Create a spreadsheet and enter scores and review results immediately after scoring.
• If there is a big discrepancy in rating between two readers then the rubric should be cleaned up.

Ground Rules:

• Don’t disclose information about a particular student or faculty member.
• Acknowledge the creators of the rubric.
• Do not make norm-referenced judgement– do not grade on the curve

They are anxious to “get the degree” rather than getting the education.

This mindset is analogous:

getting a degree is like getting  a plane ticket,

rather than qualifying them for a passport

http://www.livemint.com/2011/05/26224925/Collective-complexity.html

1955. Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
1994. Honorary Doctorate, Oregon State University
2001. Honorary Doctorate, Santa Clara University

In the blog post from “eLearning Roadtrip” called Data Change Everything the author lays out a case for investment and innovation.

We’ve seen what data analytics does for business and I’ve heard from reliable sources that the for-profit online universities are having some success with this field. The Apollo Group (University of Phoenix) hired tip wiz kids from Yahoo to lead new e-learning initiatives in their San Francisco office.

The main points:
“Making the invisible visible”

One sentence in the Foreword (by Peter T. Ewell, Vice President of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, 2002) strikes me. I underline and even post it here.

“So long as we are centered on instructional delivery, instead of the central act of students making meaning from their encounters with problems and new knowledge, well-intentioned reforms will never take.”

This gives me pause for reflection…but I read on…

He states that many faculty members “…are apt to resent critiques of current institutional practice as attacks on their own competence and commitment.”

In my experience, I’m not sure that’s been the case. I think, more often than not, the faculty who hear about student-centered pedagogy and then do not change their practices, see it more like an alternative lifestyle practices, like an organic vegetarian diet and daily practice of yoga.

Those who do those things may be healthier…but really?
Those things require a lot of work and training. AND are the benefits really so much better than what I’m doing? Student-centered teaching is a total lifestyle transformation (in the work place).

And like the organic food movement, student-centered pedagogy has made steady progress in infiltrating mainstream institutions, but still remains on the fringe.

Other pertinent quotes  from “The Learning Paradigm College” by John Tagg:

“The problem is that the explicitly stated values–which always include a strong commitment to undergraduate education–are often at variance with the actual values that drive our decisions and policies.”
Tagg cites “What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited” Alexander Astin, 1993

“[Instruction ] can be a useful tool. But it only a tool. when we make the production of tools the objective and ignore what the tools are meant to achieve we produce warped priorities and incoherent plans. To say that the mission of a college is instruction is like saying that the mission of General Motors is to produce assemble lines or that the mission of a hospital is to keep beds filled.” (Barr and Tagg, 1995)
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“if colleges exist to produce instruction, then activities that aren’t instruction, however the paradigm defines it, are simply excluded.

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