[Sugar-devel] FUDCon hackfest proposal: assessment

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg<gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> Is there any interest in figuring out how assessments might work in a
> Sugar activity API?

Couple of bits of experience from Moodle-land

 - It is probably worth matching SCORM's API when looking at
"reporting back". There is also an IMS standard for this, but I forget
which one. Both cases are overcomplicated, but show what people have
built already... which is important at interoperability time, because
the moment you get assessment data in Sugar, people will say "and I
want the data fed to my student tracking sw".

 - Computer-based assessment is a red herring. A big one. Everyone
asks for it, but it is essentially useless. The early ages of CBT were
also the early ages of AI. The myth was planted that computers would
get smarter, and help in assessment. They didn't get any smarter, they
got faster. So they can check (really fast now!) whether you did
something mind-numbingly trivial.

 Sugar is not about getting users to do something mind-numbingly
trivial. Sugar Activities are open-ended, try to have "low barrier of
entry, no ceiling". Which means: there is no way for a computer to
assess them.

There is a very interesting divide in SCORM material for education.
The really good activities are open ended, and have no assesment. All
the activities that _have_ assessment wired-in, and mechanical and
mind-numbingly trivial.

There is a case for giving users and activity developers the option,
so they can play with it, and come to terms with computer-based
assessment in their own time...

> Teachers frequently talk about the need to assess

Yes, they do that with Moodle too :-) And when they find that it isn't
magical AI that solves their hard assessment problems, they still use
it a bit but not as an important means of assessment... just like they
use simple multiple-choice quizzes on paper.

IOWs: users imagine themselves using computer-based assessment tools a
lot more than they do in practice.

Also of interest: entry of (human assigned) assessment data is a big
hit in some schools where Moodle integrates with other IS systems.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff