Open Education: “The whole model hinges on excellent assessment”

I agree with this claim.  That’s the real trick: How do you know that the students learned what they were supposed to learn?  We know that self-assessment is a bad way of judging that learning.  That’s the contribution that I see the Stanford AI class making — doing assessment, at least in the form of quizzes.

And the education could be far cheaper, because there would be no expensive instructor and students could rely on free, open educational resources rather than expensive textbooks. Costs to the student might include the assessment and the credits.“The whole model hinges on excellent assessment, a rock-solid confidence that the student has mastered the student-learning outcomes,” the memo says. “If we know with certainty that they have, we should no longer care if they raced through the course or took 18 months, or if they worked on their courses with the support of a local church organization or community center or on their own.  The game-changing idea here is that when we have assessment right, we should not care how a student achieves learning. We can blow up the delivery models and be free to try anything that shows itself to work.”

via Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.