Post for El País Digital: What changes when learning is assessed online?

There’s no doubt that, over the course of the last twenty years, different educational reforms and the widespread introduction of ICT have provided the perfect excuse for a wholesale rethinking of the education system, or at the very least for questioning it. However, these reforms and transformations have done little to address issue of how learning assessment can be performed to respond to new scenarios. Additionally, if all this takes place in a digital environment, the challenge is still greater.

Studies carried out by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) demonstrate this, highlighting the fact that there is still a gulf between the innovation in assessment methods achieved in some limited circles (early adopters) and its widescale implementation. The studies underline how ICT increases the potential of assessment, particularly with regard to student monitoring and supervision.

Nevertheless, when we design an educational activity in online education, for example, we often focus more on the format of the learning resources (to make them interactive, attractive, and accessible to all), and rarely on how we are going to assess the learning process or the results of students who have carried out said activity.

What’s more, how much time do we educators actually spend on suggesting assessment strategies that focus on stimulating and guiding the development of specific competencies rather than simply giving a final grade? If monitoring tools and techniques are becoming increasingly simpler and accessible to all users, why are we not introducing them? It’s obviously true that contemplating the use of such tools requires a certain amount of dedication on the part of educators, teachers and students alike, but is this the main obstacle, or is it more a question of resistance to change in the assessment model?

The point of all this is to highlight the fact that assessment is a key element in the educational process that is all too often side-lined when designing a learning sequence, and left until later, when we (generally) end up resorting to the use of techniques that do not allow us to evaluate how students have learned, but rather what, and then only to an extent. Sometimes we are not even assessing what we think we are.

We speak earnestly of competency-based education and training but still continue to assess these competencies by means of exams that measure our memory skills or the ability to resolve decontextualized problems. Which assessment tools would be best for a competency-based learning focus? Can ICT transform assessment practices? Assessment needs to be able to provide us with useful information to support students throughout their learning process and help them achieve the competencies proposed for the professional profile announced in the course curriculum.

In this regard, and although it is by no means a new methodology, we have recently witnessed the resurgence of an assessment technique which technology has furnished with new advantages: ePortfolios.

An ePortfolio is a strategy or tool that provides a selection of evidence on the competencies that an individual or an organisation has developed over the course of a period. Depending upon the ePortfolio’s purpose and its target audience, this selection of evidence and the presentation thereof will embrace elements for reflection and the use of different formats and media to facilitate its understanding, visualisation and assessment.

If said strategy consists of the collection of evidence of a student’s learning, with the goal of allowing different social agents to assess the process and the results obtained therefrom, it may well be worthwhile intensifying its use as an assessment methodology.

However, the scope of implementation of ePortfolio also goes above and beyond the field of education, as the competencies acquired by anyone over the course of their life also are also assessed in their personal and professional spheres. If everyone was to build their own personal ePortfolio from an early age, collating evidence of what they have learned throughout their lives, perhaps the good old CV would fade away, with employers preferring to take a look at a job applicant’s ePortfolio, because it would provide evidence of the talent and skills of the person they are evaluating. Their social or professional community would use it to take them into account on the basis of their know-how, talent and abilities, or it could be used as tailor-made gauge to detect training needs and thus draw up a Personal Development Plan.

Along these lines, in the last five years, Europe has seen a strong movement promoting the use of ePortfolios as something that can help contribute to the development of a digital identity for each and every citizen, in the broadest sense. International projects such as the Europortfolio Network foster the creation of networks and communities of practice of users and researchers employing ePortfolios for different purposes.

Even those participating in MOOCs can use ePortfolios (Guàrdia, Sangrà & Maina, 2013) as a system for collating evidence of learning experiences for assessment and subsequent accreditation. Downes also emphasises the idea that those able to keep an ePortfolio will find it useful for proving their skills and concisely introducing themselves to any social agent.

With that, I’ll leave you to reflect upon the example of the ePortfolio as a multidimensional assessment strategy. Why not add your voice to the debate? It’s only just begun!