I’ve been at the Questionmark European User Conference 2009 in Manchester the past 2 days. I must say that I have never been a great fan of Questionmark, and the previous time I looked at the product (in 2006) I found it a terribly unstructured and cluttered beast. Then again the big problem with computer based assessment technology, is that there is very little of it that is any good. Some of it is terribly technical, and requires high amounts of software development or psychometric understanding (or both) to be useful. The vast majority of it is very feature poor, in particularly when it comes to item-types. And then there is the enormous graveyard of failed Open Source projects funded by JISC and others that never made it to a stage of maturity, and adoption by anyone beyond the developers.
And so when looking at a replacement for the in-house system that we have developed over the past decade in Derby, choice was limited. After a long and painful stage of denial, we ended up having to admit that, short of a major development effort, Questionmark was probably one of the few viable alternatives. And although some of it’s inherent weaknesses remain, there are also a number of interesting developments that have actually sparked my sincere interest.
The most important of those is the Open Assessment platform. Like other vendors (such as Blackboard) Questionmark seems to have understood the importance of the Open Source movement. Every vendor deals differently with this phenomenon, but Questionmark seem serious about embracing it constructively. They are working on opening up their API’s, but also Open Sourcing community editions of integration software, such as connectors to Moodle, Blackboard and Sharepoint. This I think is a great start in opening up the product, and creating added value through collaboration with, what will hopefully be, a vibrant community of developers.
What I really hope for though, is that this openness will extend to the data, and the application framework itself. There are thousands of specialised use-cases, in particular question types, that are highly desired by higher education but that will never be a viable commercial priority for a vendor like Questionmark. However if a University could extend the Questionmark platform and create these question types, and better yet if several universities would do this and share their efforts, the value of the Questionmark platform would increase dramatically. What we need for this to happen is an application architecture for both the authoring environment and the assessment rendering engine that would support extentions, plug-ins, just like Firefox and so many other modern applications do. That way we could create our own question templates that could be authored and delivered from within Questionmark. (This short of questions being true objects that can expose themselves in authoring or delivery mode, but I will spare you that highly technical argument against the current question definition methodologies).
While deep down I would love for a collaborative fully open source assessment platform to be developed, realistically that is not going to happen. It has been tried unsuccessfully too many times to ignore. This open assessment platform might actually be the next best thing, and I will be looking to maximise this opportunity over the next year in which we are piloting the software.
Bless TED for introducing me to so many fascinating people and ideas. This morning I watched the talk by Alain de Botton: “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success”. It was an eye opening perspective on our society. I never really appreciated that when you create the illusion of a meritocracy you are implying that, in the same way that people who deserve to rise to the top, will rise to the top, people who are down at the bottom are also there because they deserve it. They are losers, not unfortunates. And given the enormous influence of randomness and chance in every life, that is an unfair judgement. It is a judgement that creates not only ‘low self-esteem’, but also the fact that suicide rates are higher in modern individualistic societies, then anywhere else in the world.
I think I might have to add some of Alain’s books to my ‘to-read’-pile.
In the past academic year we have been looking into using virtual environments for learning. Initial applications during the initial Second Life hype had left a lot of us uninspired. What afterall is the value of a virtual lecture theatre in which we can virtually raise our hands? And unfortunately many of the initial uses of Second Life were of that nature.
Our partnership with the Institutes of Quarrying and Asphalt technology yielded an opportunity to explore a much more interesting use of Second Life.
Through the creation of a Virtual Quarry, a safe and accessible learning environment was created that allows learners to learn by experience in way that would never be possible (practical, responsible) in real life. The quarry currently hosts health and safety exercises, and teaches the correct execution of blasting. In the year to come we are hoping to extend these scenarios both within the quarry, but also in other areas such as forensic sciences, environmental health and geology.
There are more interesting projects being carried out. In the UK, Daden Limited was one of the frontrunners, working with several partners in the creation of simulated scenario’s that supported problem based learning. The psychology department of the University of Derby was involved in one of these projects, and is still very active in this area. I’m not yet sure if this type of learning will find wide application as there are many practical barriers to overcome, cost not being the least of these. Nevertheless these are valuable and interesting experiments, and I’m looking forward to researching their aplication further.
Today George Osborne, the current shadow chancellor and most likely the UK’s chancellor within 9 months, casually announced that which I have been dreading for a while now: The end of the states responsibility for education. He didn’t quite put it in these words of course, but in popular right wing phrases involving consumer choice and ends to state monopolies. You can find the full transcript of the interview here, but I will quote the relevant section:
“In education, you know we are looking at bringing in new providers – private companies or voluntary groups or charities – that can offer state education paid for by the taxpayer, but offer a choice to parents and break up the state monopoly on the state provision of education.”
It is disgraceful that as a result of bailing out private interests in the banking sector, we will now be taking a step back from one of the most fundamental human needs and rights: Education. it might be that competition will spur the education system into some needed changes that it might otherwise not easily implement. But I think it more likely that a competition with a private education sector that is less restrained by government bureaucracy and funding limitations will not have a fair chance in this arena. And once education has become a for-profit business, will we have any chance of ensuring that every child and adult has access to an equal support for the deployment of their talents, both for their own benefit as for society as a whole?
It is clear, and I think a matter of broad consensus that our succes and prosperity, and that of our society, requires increasing amounts of learning, reflection and adaptation. It is this assertion that makes widening participation, and lifelong learning so important. In particular in these difficult times, the investments we make now in our skills and competences will determine how strong we will arise from the ashes of this recession.
It is therefore rather shameful to see how the higher education sector is being driven to ruin. While government is advocating that we widen articipation, at the same time it cuts back funding for teaching by 65 million pounds in the next academic year. Earlier it had already stopt funding the education of those of us who already have a degree (Equivalent or lower level Qualifications). It is strange isn’t it, that on the one side we get told how important it is that we all keep learning, as the halftime of knowledge is decreasing so rapidly. Yet our funding system now seems to say that once you have learned something, no further investment or maintenance of that learning will ever be required. We spend billions of pounds on rescuing a banking system that few of us actually really want, but we cannot commit to even a fraction of that funding to guarantee us the learning and development we all so desperately want and need. Lifelong learning is on the verge of extinction, the Times Higher Education reports, but very few of us seem to really care. Or have we just become too numb over the past months to realise what is happening?
Our regulations and practices, both in education and professional bodies increasingly breed compliance in stead of creativity. Are we selling off Higher Education to corporations, and to those with the personal wealth to fund their own development? A system that should be about the development of critical individuals, which I believe to be in the long term benefit of society as a whole, is risking slowly transforming into a goverment sponsored corporate training ground. I believe that is the very last thing that we need.
My name is Rene Meijer, and I work at the University of Derby as the manager of the Educational Development unit (EDU). I have a background in teaching and software development, and have worked in secondary, further and higher education in the Netherlands and the UK.
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