Framework for Assessment:

Technology-Assisted Learning and Collaboration

Overview by Anne H. Moore

Context for Discussion

• Accountability challenges• Technology’s promise• Collaboration needs and opportunities• Higher education traditions and ethos• Contemporary issues and drivers• Individual achievement and group

accomplishment

Proposition

• The ubiquity of rapidly changing technologies calls for improved articulation of what students need to know and be able to do in technology-enabled learning environments, in their local communities and professions, and the global marketplace.

Being Fluent with Information Technology* or FIT

• Contemporary skills: use computers, applications and networks

• Foundational concepts: discern principles and ideas of computers, networks, and information

• Intellectual capabilities: apply technology in complex and sustained situations

*(National Research Council, Committee on Information Technology Literacy, 1999.)

Purpose of FIT-ness

• Contemporary skills – acquire basic skills that change as technology changes

• Foundational concepts – explain the how, why, and why not of technology as it evolves

• Intellectual capabilities – empower people to think abstractly about information and its possibilities – collaboration high on capability list

Assessment Strategies

• Contemporary skills – easy to assess and frequently done

• Foundational concepts – descriptions, contrasts, comparisons also forthcoming today

• Intellectual capabilities – still at early stages despite growing calls for accountability related to learning outcomes

Collaboration, for example

• What do achievements in collaboration in a technology-enabled environment look like? E.G., what are the learning outcomes desired?

• Does using technology require collaborators to do something different? Be more explicit than when face to face?

• What does this mean in any domain attempting technology-assisted collaboration?

Proposition

• The NRC’s framework for FIT-ness is also a useful framework for organizing and grouping assessments of technology-assisted learning outcomes.

• People who know/work with the technologies can effectively assist in conversations with colleagues across domains about technology-enabled learning outcomes.