The Living Schoolbook

For the past year or so, the LSB has been developing a set of tools that allow students and faculty to describe learning outcomes and link them to classroom activities.  We believe that this is an important step that would complete a collaborative learning environment that is a blend of traditional courseware tools and portfolio tools.  As far as I know the idea (although simple in premise) has not yet been developed on other platforms.  We have released the code with the Sakai Foundation educational community license.  We think that this is an important idea that many institutions would be interested in using and further developing and we would welcome their participation.

In Helen Barret's latest blog entry she again cautions against the misuse of portfolio systems to meet program assessment needs. While reading it and considering our own set of "Goal Aware" tools in development, I considered how we were addressing this problem.

Although our PT3 funding was originally earmarked to develop a student centered portfolio system, our goal aware development is centered around courseware tools that (among other things) will be used for program assessment and eventually accreditation requirements. While we could have spent our developer's resources to improve the student-centered, reflection-rich portfolio system, we limited our technical staff's involvement in OSP software to configuration of the toolset instead. There a number of reasons that we have focused our development on courseware tools, but I think I can justify it.

There are really 6 steps to the Goal Aware Activity process.

1. Establish Goals and Sets of Goals (create and publish them).
2. Associate Goals with Activities (tag/link an assignment with a  goal).
3. Engage students with the Activity and make them aware of the Goals.
4. Evaluate student performance against a rubric for each linked goal.
5. Analyze the results.
6. Correct instruction/activities/program.

During step 2 we ask faculty to provide a rubric and a "rationale" for the link between the activity and the goal.  While I was giving a demonstration of the Goal Manager and Goal Aware Assignment tool today at the Sakai conference I had a funny realization. I realized that the faculty are going to blow off the rationale.  Like my grandma used to say, “Dimes to donuts” they are not going to provide meaningful information here.  

• Plans & implements lessons to meaningfully engage all learners (Proficiency 3.2)
• Makes effective use of assessment data to plan for and adapt instruction for individuals and groups (Proficiency 4.3)

After a two month sprint, we have designed and developed a new Sakai tool. Our first "Goal Aware" tool has been a modification to the existing Assignment tool that is packaged with Sakai. With this tool, faculty will be able to associate SOE proficiencies (a global goal set) with classroom assignments and rate student work as it pertains to those proficiencies. More importantly, it will provide them with the opportunity throughout the semester to decide how their assignments address the institution's teaching goals. This week we will be performing testing in-house with our own staff and hopefully a couple of faculty.

Our previous PT3 grant funded the LSB's development/training/use of a homegrown Learning Management System that we called Dialogue. When the School of Education received another PT3 grant a couple of years ago we considered adding more functionality to Dialogue to support "portfolio creation", a popular trend in education today. We later decided not to expand our Dialogue system but to build a new system just for the creation of portfolios.

While we were considering this, the School of Education was preparing for an NCATE accreditation review. Several faculty were interested in the use of portfolio systems to meet requirement #2 of NCATE. In a nutshell, this requirement states that the college has to have an information system that allows faculty to see whether or not they are effective in teaching students. The implication is that the system must be aware of the objectives of the institution and faculty and be able to report back some data about how students are progressing in relation to those objectives.