Ever since graduate school, I have been interested in the mental categories that often implicitly control human thinking. I remember once being asked what my doctoral dissertation was going to be about, and I answered that it was going to be about aboutness. (For those who were not present at the time, in the late 1970’s, such deconstruction and reflexivity were rewarded.)
Academic fashions come and go, but the question of “aboutness” remains relevant. To state that a text is “about” something is to invoke a theme that is already shared between writer and reader, and the “already” aspect means that the boundaries of this theme are nearly always assumed and conventional – beyond question for the purpose at hand. What something is “about” sets the (usually uncritically accepted) parameters that, in turn, control how one is able to think about something. Youngme Moon, who teaches at the Harvard Business School, discusses this in her just-published book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, in which she talks about the “categories” in which brands are viewed and understood, and the difficulty that arises when genuine innovation creates something that simultaneously does and does not fit inside conventional categories.
Such is the case with eLumen. Is the appropriate category “assessment?” Well, yes, of course, and no, not at all. It depends, in part, on how an academic institution chooses to use eLumen. The elements in the deep data structure (programs, courses, student learning outcomes, rubrics, students, etc) can be combined in a way that creates a virtual model of a conventional academic institution, and it can then be used to more efficiently implement “assessment” projects. Indeed, many institutions are using eLumen in that way.
However, with the latest work being done in eLumen’s development, the same elements in the same deep data structure can be combined differently, so that the process that is modeled can be: 1) each degree being defined as a set of expected student learning outcomes for graduates 2) each outcome-for-a-graduate being defined as a calibrated set of course-level and assignment-level outcomes (how well? how often? under what conditions?), 3) individual student work/activity being evaluated relative to one or more of these calibrated outcomes, 4) student progress toward and attainment of any given outcome-for-a-graduate being tracked by instantaneous analysis of the pattern of a student’s achievement across courses and other contexts, and 5) the student (and appropriate others) seeing where he or she stands, in real time, relative to each and every outcome-for-a-graduate (both for his or her chosen program and for the institution as a whole) — “educational GPS” — and responding accordingly.
Is this “assessment?” Not by any conventional definition.
Instead, this is now about doing teaching and learning in a new underlying (and unfamiliar) institutional environment. The environment that has existed for a century is one in which the sole student reward system is driven by a narrow-band educational accounting system — the accumulation of course grades and credits. Whatever students do in their courses, in that environment, “counts” only to the extent that it is connected to grades and credits, and that is a per-course designation.
In contrast, a way to think about eLumen is that it is now about a new and different student reward system, a broad-band educational accounting system that tracks the personal, professional, and intellectual development of individual students over time, using student learning outcomes as the academic currency. Everything about teaching and learning can now be re-imagined in a new institutional environment. “Assessment” now goes away – nothing extra needs to be done, since the essential process fully answers all of the questions posed by the assessment/accountability challenge.
With that in mind, “assessment” is a temporary institutional imperative to necessarily devote attention and money to knowing / showing / responding to actual educational results, and that institutional attention and money can now be used to intentionally grow a different institutional environment governed by expected and actual student learning outcomes. This is thoroughly unexpected.
