How convincing is alternative assessment for use in higher education?

The current preference for alternative assessment has been partly stimulated by recent evidence on learning which points to the importance of students' active engagement in the learning process. While alternative assessment may well fulfil the aims of formative assessment, its value in the summative assessment required in higher education is more problematic. If alternative assessment devices are to be used for summative purposes, the validity of alternative assessment has to be considered. The paper argues that task specification and marking consistency in alternative assessment can make comparability of performance difficult to effect, thereby leaving alternative assessment a less than convincing form for use in higher educatio

Exploring metadata standards for competence descriptions in the business & management domain

This paper explores the development and use of competency metadata standards. As there has recently been a surge of a number of standards to address the challenge of representing competencies and there is a rising need to develop a common methodology, as well as methods and tools for developing, reusing, adapting, integrating such standards, this research is now becoming important and timely. We explore this within the context of the OpenScout project, which is building a federation of repositories with content in the areas of business and management. Thus this study is limited to metadata standards for competencies in the business and management fields, but it is aimed that the lessons from this domain can transfer to other fields and will inform the wider debate on the development and use of such standards. The paper revisits a set of standards for competence descriptions and provides recommendations as to which standard would suit better the nature of the repository, the requirements of stakeholders, and the Open Content resources. In particular, the paper proposes an adaptation and extension of the IEEE-RCD model, employing an application profiling approach, and taking into account the granularity of the European Qualifications Framework and the requirements of Open Content resources.OpenScout project (Contract no.: 428016, “Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training”

Interoperability Between ELearning Systems

Online assessments are an integral part of eLearning systems that enhance both distance and continuous education. Although over two-hundred and fifty eLearning applications exist, most educational institutions are trapped with a particular vendor primarily due to lack of in test-question sharing features. This paper highlights the evolution of eLearning systems whilst detailing the two most prominent objective test question standards, namely, QML and QTI. An analysis conducted amongst software houses which are involved in the development of eLearning systems confirms the fact that most applications make use of proprietary formats and clearly shows a lack of import and export options amongst other features

Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools

Today, data driven decision-making is at the center of educational policy debates in the United States. School districts are increasingly turning to rapidly evolving technologies and cloud computing to satisfy their educational objectives and take advantage of new opportunities for cost savings, flexibility, and always-available service among others. As public schools in the United States rapidly adopt cloud-computing services, and consequently transfer increasing quantities of student information to third-party providers, privacy issues become more salient and contentious. The protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing is generally unknown both to the public and to policy-makers. This study thus focuses on K-12 public education and examines how school districts address privacy when they transfer student information to cloud computing service providers. The goals of the study are threefold: first, to provide a national picture of cloud computing in public schools; second, to assess how public schools address their statutory obligations as well as generally accepted privacy principles in their cloud service agreements; and, third, to make recommendations based on the findings to improve the protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing. Fordham CLIP selected a national sample of school districts including large, medium and small school systems from every geographic region of the country. Using state open public record laws, Fordham CLIP requested from each selected district all of the district’s cloud service agreements, notices to parents, and computer use policies for teachers. All of the materials were then coded against a checklist of legal obligations and privacy norms. The purpose for this coding was to enable a general assessment and was not designed to provide a compliance audit of any school district nor of any particular vendor.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/clip/1001/thumbnail.jp

Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools

Today, data driven decision-making is at the center of educational policy debates in the United States. School districts are increasingly turning to rapidly evolving technologies and cloud computing to satisfy their educational objectives and take advantage of new opportunities for cost savings, flexibility, and always-available service among others. As public schools in the United States rapidly adopt cloud-computing services, and consequently transfer increasing quantities of student information to third-party providers, privacy issues become more salient and contentious. The protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing is generally unknown both to the public and to policy-makers. This study thus focuses on K-12 public education and examines how school districts address privacy when they transfer student information to cloud computing service providers. The goals of the study are threefold: first, to provide a national picture of cloud computing in public schools; second, to assess how public schools address their statutory obligations as well as generally accepted privacy principles in their cloud service agreements; and, third, to make recommendations based on the findings to improve the protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing. Fordham CLIP selected a national sample of school districts including large, medium and small school systems from every geographic region of the country. Using state open public record laws, Fordham CLIP requested from each selected district all of the district’s cloud service agreements, notices to parents, and computer use policies for teachers. All of the materials were then coded against a checklist of legal obligations and privacy norms. The purpose for this coding was to enable a general assessment and was not designed to provide a compliance audit of any school district nor of any particular vendor.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/clip/1001/thumbnail.jp

Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools

Today, data driven decision-making is at the center of educational policy debates in the United States. School districts are increasingly turning to rapidly evolving technologies and cloud computing to satisfy their educational objectives and take advantage of new opportunities for cost savings, flexibility, and always-available service among others. As public schools in the United States rapidly adopt cloud-computing services, and consequently transfer increasing quantities of student information to third-party providers, privacy issues become more salient and contentious. The protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing is generally unknown both to the public and to policy-makers. This study thus focuses on K-12 public education and examines how school districts address privacy when they transfer student information to cloud computing service providers. The goals of the study are threefold: first, to provide a national picture of cloud computing in public schools; second, to assess how public schools address their statutory obligations as well as generally accepted privacy principles in their cloud service agreements; and, third, to make recommendations based on the findings to improve the protection of student privacy in the context of cloud computing. Fordham CLIP selected a national sample of school districts including large, medium and small school systems from every geographic region of the country. Using state open public record laws, Fordham CLIP requested from each selected district all of the district’s cloud service agreements, notices to parents, and computer use policies for teachers. All of the materials were then coded against a checklist of legal obligations and privacy norms. The purpose for this coding was to enable a general assessment and was not designed to provide a compliance audit of any school district nor of any particular vendor.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/clip/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Impact of External Audience on Second Graders\u27 Writing Quality

The overarching purpose of writing is to communicate; as such, the intended audience is a critical consideration for writers. However, elementary school writing instruction commonly neglects the role of the audience. Typically, children are asked to compose a piece of text without a specific audience that is usually evaluated by the classroom teacher. Previous studies have found a relationship between audience specification and higher quality writing among older children; this study examines the impact of audience specification on young children’s writing. Using a within-subjects design, the study compared writing quality when second-grade students wrote for internal versus external audiences and found that children are more likely to produce higher quality writing when writing for an external audience than when writing for their teacher