Inside Higher Ed: Digital Assessments
Blackboard and other players are planning to enter business of helping colleges measure what goes on in the classroom.
Critical Theories in Education
Inside Higher Ed: Digital Assessments
Blackboard and other players are planning to enter business of helping colleges measure what goes on in the classroom.
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This is already happening with NCATE accreditation. At our university, all certification programs, like teacher education, have to use LiveText, something like Blackboard. Students have to subscribe to it. This year, adjuncts were told that if they did not want to learn LiveText, they would have to look elsewhere for work. Since we, like other colleges, rely heavily on adjuncts, whether this will come to fruition remains to be seen. Luckily two of our other masters’ programs refuse to use LiveText because it is too difficult for them to implement in cohort groups.
As part of NCATE, we have to collect key assessments. This means that everyone who teaches a particular course has to have one assignment in common. For the social foundations class, it’s a personal philosophy statement, something that most of us do anyhow. But the way I do it is to have students use multimedia/PowerPoint, not a 3 page statement. Not sure how that’s gonna fly!
Students submit not just the key assessments, but ALL their work on LiveText. Faculty submit their syllabi along with entering all course goals and objectives with accompanying assignments. This generates handy charts and graphs that can be accessed only by faculty and administration, but I can definately see the overall climate of surveillance. For example, when we were shown last year’s assessment report, the screen displayed charts and graphs of three professors. The speaker said that one way to “use this data” could be to look and see if any professors were “sticking out” as in giving too many high grades on the rubrics or too many lower grades, and to then “consult” with them to find out why the inconsistency.
Sure it was portrayed as a mild way to keep in “communication” with faculty, but this whole line of simply having better assessment strategies is a bunch of hooey. The real goal is to track exactly what each and every instructor does in their classroom. NCATE isn’t interested in this use of LiveText- they only want to see some sort of assessment system in action. So this is going way beyond what NCATE wants to create a capital-friendly environment and encourage conformity. NCATE isn’t intersted in a key assessment each semester- they only want a one-time set of student examples until the key assessment is re-designed. But our school wants us to keep on collecting these assessments. Why?
Because LiveText collects ALL student work, those who want to look in on other instructors only have to click a button and up pops the work. Then they can take the “evidence” in to “conference” with a particular instructor as to why they were too hard or too easy on a student. Last I checked, I thought that the professor, not the administration, was responsible for assessing students. Oh wait, ha ha, silly me!