Posts tagged instructionaldesign

Describing skills necessary to design effective learning experiences in yesterday’s entry, I omitted one that may perhaps prove to be one of the more significant challenges for faculty teaching in Second Life: assessment.

Following yesterday’s post, I happened to meet up with an individual (will add more specific information, with her permission ;-) to discuss a few ideas. The conversation turned to a project slated at her institution for the Fall in which business entrepreneurship students will engage an experiential, authentic learning activity in Second Life: start a small business in Second Life while addressing principles of entrepreneurship. Of course, the institution wants to evaluate the effectiveness and net gain of using Second Life in comparison to more traditional modes of content delivery; to accomplish that, they’re planning to have a group using Second Life and a group not using Second Life each complete an end of course exam. Throughout the course, they’re also planning for the Second Life group to produce written work focused on entrepreneurial principles.

My question and point was and is this. In classroom environments, we use objective exams and written work to estimate how well a learner understands content because the classroom environment limits our opportunities to evaluate actual performance utilizing the content that’s been taught. Traditional meatspace or web-based classrooms for teaching entrepreneurship have a variety of constraints that prohibit learners from actually starting a business. In lieu of that actual performance, learners can read about starting a business; they can watch videos; they can listen to faculty or guest speakers talk about it; they can discuss it in small groups; or, they may be able to play serious games simulating it. But, they typically do not have a realistic opportunity actually to start a business using principles of entrepreneurship. So, we can only approximate how well they might actually “do it in the real world,” and we approximate by assessments that hopefully do a good job of measuring the ability to perform in the real world.

So, if we have the opportunity to measure actual, “real world” performance, should we not do that rather than approximating? Certainly. Will observing a learner’s actual efforts to start a business not always be a more accurate way of determining if they’ve learned the concepts of entrepreneurship? Absolutely. So, if we can design learning activities in Second Life that afford learners the opportunity to actually start a business, shouldn’t we evaluate the artifacts and performance produced by that experience? Most likely.

I’m not suggesting we have to entirely abandon approximations of performance like objective exams or written work; in many instances, local, state or national policies require those more objective, more easily standardized assessments for accountability purposes. However, there’s something terribly incongruous if learners authentically performing learned skills in Second Life are only evaluated and assessed based upon approximations of their ability to perform. Faculty teaching in Second Life should assess actual performance.

Thus, the capability to design “alternate forms of assessment” (a term used in the educational psychology literature to describe performance rubrics, portfolios, etc) will prove, I believe, to be a critical skill for successful and quality use of Second Life in educational environments.

The issue is that that type of assessment is not easy for or familiar to most faculty teaching the content. If my description of details related to entrepreneurship seem scant, there’s a reason for that; I have NO experience with or background in that field. I chose to be an instructional designer and educational technologist, not an entrepreneur (although I could easily tell you which would have been the bigger financial payoff ;-). Likewise, the individual I met has NO experience or background in educational assessment. My graduate work is in instructional design and technology; hers is in computer science and business. So, to repeat a question, slightly modified, from yesterday’s post, “How many institutions offering Second Life learning will expect faculty trained in specific disciplines (Computer Science or Business) to master a skill set which instructional designers have spent a doctoral graduate career learning?”