A few things change with twenty-first-century educational technologies, but not as much as it would first seem. For the ‘flipped classroom’

The electronic whiteboard may be interactive and bring into the classroom the endless knowledge resources of the internet, but all students’ eyes still need to be directed to the board and its master, the teacher.

Many of the technologies of assessment that we have just mentioned can be differently applied to effect a very different social construction of education. Or different assessment technologies can be developed to serve the peculiar needs of the social learning ecologies that we call education. We’ll focus here mainly on the affordances of assessment using ‘big data and ‘cloud computing’ technologies.

The grain size of these data points may be so small and so numerous that without learning-analytic systems, they would have almost entirely been lost to the teacher.

the distinction between formative and summative assessment is blurred. Semantically legible data points that are ‘designed in’ can serve traditional formative purposes

Learner Differences: Equity and Diversity

The objective of teaching and learning is for every student will attain mastery of a particular aspect of a domain, and formative assessment can help to achieve this. Instead of retrospectively judging relative success and failure across a norm, formative assessment can tell a learner and their teacher what they still need to learn to achieve mastery.

Forces of Educational Change

Learning Management Systems, e-Textbooks. Replacing print textbooks, The “Flipped Classroom”, Intelligent Tutors, Games, and Simulations

Discussion Boards, supporting various forms of conversational interaction

Adaptive, Personalized, and Differentiated Instruction. Such systems monitor differential learning progress from student to student and adapt the path and pace of learning to the speed at which the learner is progressing.

Recursive Feedback

Assessment can increasingly be embedded in instruction, allowing us to realize long-held ambitions to offer a richer formative assessment.

The focus of what is assessable now shifts from individual cognition, to the artifacts of knowledge representation and their social provenance. It’s not what you can remember, but the knowledge artifact you can create, recognizing its sources in collective memory via links and citations, and tracing the collaborative construction process via the feedback offered by peers and teachers, and the revisions made in response

Differentiated Learning

recalibrating systems, and adaptive learning mechanisms, new educational media make the organizational intricacies of productive diversity ever more manageable. In fact, managing learner differences becomes easier than one-size-fits-all teaching because there is no dissonance between bored or disaffected students for whom the pace of learning may be wrong.