Digital Arrays for Evidence-Based Learning

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Digital Arrays for Evidence-Based Learning

Article

Digital Arrays for Evidence-Based Learning

8/20/2008

By Trent Batson

Web 2.0 is best defined not as a technology development but as a moment of disrupted equilibrium in our culture. Our culture is redefining itself and we are redefining how we see learning. It is time for educators to get out of the box of seat time, finally, and consider evidence-based learning.

Our current educational habits suddenly seem antiquated. People at conferences in the past few months seem to know we are at a turning point. It's been more than a century since the basic terms of teaching and learning in the U.S. have fundamentally changed. One of these terms, the practice of learners meeting teachers in a room, has persisted longer, over many centuries.

Perhaps we only did what we had to do -- there simply was no other way, centuries ago, for students to learn than to gather by the person who had knowledge in her or his head. But, now that knowledge sources and experts are available and in abundance via the Web, we do have choices about how learning is conducted. Here's one way to reconsider the higher education enterprise: DAEBL, Digital Arrays for Evidence-Based Learning.

Evidence-based learning, as a phrase, seems to be mostly identified with, and used in, the health care industry where it's really important that students have real-life experience. Let's borrow it to describe how higher education in general can re-organize to fit with the knowledge culture we find ourselves in.

Four Pillars for the Enterprise of Higher Education

There are four key adjustments that higher education can make to adapt to the current age: (I) having in place an assessment management system, both the technology and people; (II) using active learning as the primary frame for learning design so students can develop evidence to then submit to the reviewer/gatekeepers for the assessment management system; (III) redefining faculty and student roles to fit into this evidence-based learning framework; and (IV) disconnecting the financial model of seat time from learning designs around evidence-based learning.

Pillar I: the assessment management system. Evidence-Based Learning (EBL) is the student side of learning outcomes assessment that has become so widespread in the country, especially for accreditation and re-accreditation and for other institutional reporting requirements. The idea is that student work is considered evidence of progress toward general learning goals as specified in a rubric structure. The institution can then show it is doing its job because it can demonstrate a delta down to a high level of granularity.

In some cases, student work (the "evidence") may be reviewed by 2 or 3 people before it can be considered valid and therefore credited in the assessment management system (often inaccurately called an "ePortfolio"). The assessment management system -- Livetext, TaskStream, TrueOutcomes, OSP, Blackboard Outcomes, Foliotek, Nuventive, Edumetry, and so forth (see http://wwwedpath.com/epvendors.htm)