Assessment is an interesting subject.  In everyday life assessment is usually against a standard of ‘fit for purpose”. But what is the purpose of education?

• ‘It’s a good thing’.  So everyone does it, learning things they may not necessarily need to know, as an entry into civilised society and as a qualification for employment.  The higher the score the better you are deemed to be; hence highly structured, consistent assessment which does not try to assess useful knowledge, just knowledge to a standard.
• To be better at what you have chosen to do.  Hence vocational education including things like law and accountancy.  Even here it is really only an entry card with real life needing internet trawling for precedent and case law.  Assessment in this case should be authentic to practical demands and involve problem solving.  Some of it is like this, some of it is just mindless repetition of facts.
• To be able to do something new.  This is the tricky one but particularly relevant to OU and distance education.  In this case, reliance on context and ‘real life’ situations actively discriminates against those with no current context.  Case studies are OK where the context is provided but questions relying on use of knowledge from practice and contextual background are not.

So it is horses for courses.  However, it is difficult to see how formative assessment/feedback on coursework cannot be beneficial in all three situations, in that it is by nature personal, relevant and remedial.  However, coursework used in summative assessment can be ‘gamed’ and hence has got a bad name – it is said to be too easy.  It does though represent a much closer approximation to how knowledge is gained and refined in everyday life than terminal summative assessment.

So I think Web 2.0 tools should be very valuable for assessment.  Assessment of forums, blogs, quizzes, wikis, shared projects should all contribute to measurement of performance.  How one does that consistently and equitably is another discussion but it seems to be a demonstrably more appropriate system than trying to make terminal summative assessment authentic.

What did I expect?

I expected a highly structured approach – that is almost inevitable where a technique is being taught through a worked example.  The level of structure was – as has become typical in MAODE – rather more than I expected at MA level.  With the trend even at GCSE to move back from heavily prescribed learning and assessment it is a jolt to be force-fed with processes, templates and headings down the required path.  I thought however that we handled it well – we didn’t ignore the process but we did take some shortcuts and overrides in line with our team judgement.

What did I hope for? What did I do, and what did I achieve?

I hoped to learn about design and I achieved that. I was (more than most) unfamiliar with software/learning design processes and I found the structured approach useful. I particularly liked the Personas, Forces and Use Cases which required me to take that user perspective.  I was surprised at the degree of care we had to take to ensure engagement from users.  I am from a generation used to doing what they are told – I have to learn to earn that attention from the current generation of users.  This is valuable for me as I take the MA forward into real application in today’s environment.

Which barriers and challenges did I confront, and how did we resolve them? Finally, what did I learn?

We are counselled only to talk about process as it impacts the learning but I can’t ignore the barriers put in place to practical learning by the micro-sequential process (by item, by day, by each team member) which flew in the face of availability for a part-time, world-spread course membership.  This impacted learning by compressing useful processes into windows of availability and making it impossible to compare learning and interpretation because of the mismatch of timings.  We resolved this by a sequential approach of building on each other’s work which was highly successful – but would have been high risk in a less cohesive group.

I have already discussed the learning I achieved about design.  I also learnt the real value of trusting and respecting the intellectual inputs of fellow learners as complementary and part of one’s own learning process.

Officially this section is called ‘ideation’ but that is a step too far from English for my comfort.  It is interesting that some word contractions seem to work and some just seem to jar. I guess the key is clarity – it takes me longer to work out that ideation means creation of ideas than to use the longer phrase!

The design patterns and principles exercise was useful – distilling the key learning messages out of the case studies and theories which would be relevant to our design.  This then fed into storyboarding which again showed the diverse (but not divergent) strengths of our team.  We approached it from our experience – I created a flowchart for the game process and an event map and Gordon then fleshed out the flowchart into a more professional systems diagram.  Christine fed from this into a much more visual mindmap style of process flow with each level subdivided into what will become separate page elements of the game.  Floriane took the user’s point of view, taking a couple of personas through the process to see how well it met their needs and preferences.  Altogether a great combination of relevant skills to get a useful and usable result.  Much quicker than duplicating and debating each process!

We are now approaching the convergence phase – producing a coherent product.  Some nervousness but equally complete confidence that our pragmatic approach will produce a competent product.  Tom Peters has just produced a great paper – ‘Systems have their place; SECOND place’!  He points out that human values, organisational culture and instinct for what is appropriate – the soft stuff – supported by hard systems can produce great results.  Systems on their own can create conceptually perfect but practically disastrous results.  I think our team has concentrated well on trusting our judgement, interpreting the ‘rules’ to produce a good product in the time available.

Peters, T. (2013)  Systems have their place; SECOND place [Online]. Available from http://www.tompeters.com/docs/SystemsSecondPlace021113_final.pdf (accessed 07 June 2013).