The emerging networked system that increasingly links a student to knowledge, teachers, other students — and now testing — will release that student to compete globally. Treating a student as is our usual way, as a member of a class, traps her in the bell curve that evaluates her achievement in relation to others in her class.
This locks her learning into a notch within a group directed by a certain teacher and happening in a certain place or time. Doing this is an advantage if she is in a class of superior students at a terrific school. Not so much if she is a member of a class in a mediocre or failing school — where the student in her class who tests at the top of her class would score below the bottom student in a better school. This mechanism defeats all the optimism and cash dumps toward “getting scores up” in awful schools in Chicago, Detroit, New York — as well as many schools in developing countries, etc. etc, etc.. Analog student testing is affected in major ways by the school setting where it is happening.
The future online system will let a student anywhere take a test for Algebra 1, for example, and be scored against everyone else — in the world! — who takes it. The setting where this will happen is the emerging global network of learning individuals who are interlinked as individual nodes. And as Clay Shirky put it: Here Comes Everybody! In the next very few years virtually everybody in the younger generations will be connected — each becoming a node, free from the old time class notch.
One of the most elevating changes for a student that networking will bring to education is this transition of testing and assessment from the class group to the individual learner, accomplished by connecting an online test to a student being evaluated. We are just a little way down that road so far, but we are moving inexorably in that direction. An article this week in WebWire describes: Fifteen hundred college exams proctored online:
. . . Jarrod Morgan, co-developer of the unique online system [says]: “We have improved the system by adding live certified proctors, real time audio/video using TokBox, technical assistance, practice exams, identity authentication, and the ability to assist exam-takers by remotely controlling their computers during an exam,” said a proud Morgan.
“Now that we’ve perfected online live-proctor exams and coupled the service with identity authentication,” commented Morgan, “and actually proven the system by proctoring 1,500 exams, we’re attracting more and more interested colleges and universities each week.”
