What I’m reading:
Is Your Degree Program Too Complicated? Poor design and needless bloat are derailing students. asks us to think about “curricular complexity” and the role instructors play in retaining and graduating students. While “needless bloat” is certainly not something that sounds good for students, I’m not certain we would all agree that streamlining a student’s path from matriculation to graduation, with no room for detours, is the best choice either.
Everyone Has Invisible Bias offers some techniques for exploring our biases and how to help students apply these same approaches.
Perhaps the biggest challenge we face when accessing information is confronting our biases before we are able to unpack the opinions and insights of other people. Often these biases are unconscious or implicit, meaning we might not even be aware we have them.
In The Cult of Quality Matters, Martha Burris and Jesse Stommel offer a thoughtful discussion of how impersonal rubrics like Quality Matters serve neither us nor our students well.
Quality Matters, with its 42-point rubric, is one of the most pervasive and insidious examples of a standardized approach to the development of online courses. Insidious because it offers solutionism (or solution theater) more than an actual solution. Pervasive, because it has been so widely adopted, because it is looked to as a “gold standard,” because it is often universally implemented as a requirement across entire institutions, and because the items on the rubric itself are inflexible but also vague enough that they gesture to an all-seeing panoptic gaze…The problem with the Quality Matters rubric is that it not only denies the subjectivity of human judgment, but that it appears to live in a world where there are no humans altogether.
This article is about much more than just QM. It’s a long read - but well worth the time.
Assessment System with Resources: An Overview offers several technology-enhanced grading and feedback practices (including some I’ve written about before, text expanders and audio feedback). For instructors working within an LMS, I think the best idea he offers is #4A: Providing Feedback - Hyperlinked Rubrics. I really like the idea of connecting rubric descriptors to resources for students.
The key is in how the rubric is built. Notice that the different levels are not indicators of quality, but rather more like steps in a process. You learn X first, and then we move onto Y. This helps the student be able to take ownership in their learning. I may not know how to go from "multiple errors in end-of-sentence punctuation" to "a few errors," but I can learn how to go from developing simple sentences to developing compound sentences. It makes the growth tangible, more concrete. Not only that, but it doesn't devalue earlier steps in the learning process. Once those concepts are identified, then it becomes easy to see how to hyperlink resources in there. This makes the link between feedback and instruction tighter. It closes the loop on what used to feel like an open-ended process.