[p2pu-webcraft] Using OSQA for badges (and more information on the assessment and badge pilot)

Erin Knight erin.knight21 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 8 15:36:56 UTC 2011


Hey Parag -

I think these are both definitely good ideas and things that we have talked
about for future iterations. We knew we needed to start somewhere and so
identified a core set of assessments/badges for the first round. But there
is room for badges like the peer helper - in fact, the OSQA participation
badges currently do reflect this type of behavior, but moving forward, we
will probably highlight it specifically through SoW badges.

In terms of #2 - not sure if this is totally an OSQA specific issue, or just
the badge granularity and peer assessment model. We do have some badges that
are fairly 'big' in this round - JS, for example, could be broken down into
many levels or skills that then aggregate up to a JS proficient badge. This
would reduce the peer assessment burden. We do plan to have more granular
badges moving forward, although we are definitely looking for feedback on
the right granularity (for example, I wouldn't expect that we would have
badges for every <> tag in HTML). Another thing we will do moving forward is
rely more on the narrative piece - learners will post work but also a
narrative highlighting the key evidence that demonstrates their skill, thus
streamlining the process a bit.

For those on the list that aren't aware, we recently launched an
assessment/badge pilot in School of Webcraft featuring an initial set of
assessments and associated badges for learners. We are using a customized
instance of OSQA for the pilot to handle the work submission, assessment
(voting) and badge issuing: http://badges.p2pu.org (you can log in with your
P2PU account info).

*One thing to note - there are also a number of School of Social Innovation
(SoSI) badges that are running this session too, so you will see a number of
assessments and badges with "SoSI" in there as well.

For more on the badge pilot, see:
http://erinknight.com/post/3218758524/school-of-webcraft-badge-pilot
http://erinknight.com/post/3472903834/its-aliiiiiiive-the-sow-badge-pilot-that-is

For a little more background on WHY we are doing this:
It's the future!! The future of P2PU and other similar open education
efforts is to further legitimize the learning that is occurring by offering
learners a way to capture the learning that is occuring and carry it with
them to other contexts, such as formal institutions or the broader career
ecosystem. We are exploring badges as a way to do this. Learners can earn
badges across various learning experiences, and those badges can act as a
personalized transcript to demonstrate learning and signal achievements.
Ultimately, we hope that badges will provide an alternative certification
system for learners. Webcraft is an ideal environment because of the
alignment with Mozilla - badges and assessments are Mozilla-endorsed and
Mozilla (and other similar companies/institutions) can recognize badges as
relevant and legitimate evidence of job skills.

Definitely check it out, give us feedback on this list.

Thanks!
Erin

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:45 AM, Stian Håklev <shaklev at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Parag,
>
> thanks, I think these are very useful ideas.
>
> I don't think we meant to confine badges to only OSQA, indeed in the new
> platform, whose development is now really gathering steam, I am guessing
> that we will try to build this in more directly. Part of the reason for OSQA
> was to get started quickly, and gain some experience, without having to wait
> for custom-built technology.
>
> Your idea of splitting up large competency-based badges in smaller chunks
> for reviewers is also interesting.
>
> Stian
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 23:46, Parag Shah <adaptives at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have been thinking about badges and the environment which can support
>> badges for learners.
>>
>> I guess OSQA is a natural choice because it suppports QA type forums and
>> badges. However, I had a few thoughts which I feel might be important as we
>> go ahead.
>>
>> 1. Context of community badges.
>> Along with competency badges, we might also support other badges, such as
>> 'peer helper', 'consistent learner', etc. Most likely these badges would be
>> in the context of a course. So if someone gets a 'peer helper' badge in the
>> Javascript course, it might be a good feature if we could reflect this,
>> because that person may not have been a 'peer helper' in another course. It
>> may also be a nice idea to reflect proof of the work along with a badge. It
>> will be a bit cumbersome to have all this information in a coherent and
>> clutter-less way, in OSQA.
>>
>> 2. Voting for challenge parts.
>> Right now our notion of voting for a challenge submission, is to evaluate
>> the entire work of a candidate. However, for slightly large challenges, it
>> may be a deterant, for a reviewer to spend 3 hours reviewing a challenge.
>> However, they would be happy to review certain parts of a challenge based on
>> their expertise and time available. Not sure how well OSQA will support
>> that.
>>
>> I don't mean to say that OSQA is a bad choice. Rather just trying to get a
>> discussion going on where we might get into bottlenecks with OSQA, and if we
>> should consider some alternatives or customize OSQA.
>>
>> --
>> Thanks & Regards
>> Parag Shah
>> http://blog.adaptivesoftware.biz
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters
>
>
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