We Do, In Fact, Need Some (Non-Stinking) Badges
My latest Chronicle of Higher Education column is about an interesting but little-noticed program run by the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education that aims to create hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free online educational resources that will be available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use, modify, and resell. Of course, such Open Educational Resources (OER) are only half of the equation:
That still leaves the problem of credit. Public libraries were the original OER, yet people can’t demand a diploma just because they’ve learned from a book. But here, too, new developments are under way. The latest and most sophisticated open educational resources have tests embedded within them because assessment is a fundamental element of learning. Feedback-based,