Choosing the Artifacts
Authentic assessment challenged me to think about the different types of assessment and their primary functions, as well as the different uses of assessment and evaluation. My learning has taken me from the pitfalls and merits of standardized testing to the authentic tasks created by each of my professors in this Masters program. As well as being educated in academic assessment practices, I also received instruction in the evaluation of corporate training programs using the ADDIE Model to determine their effectiveness.
Authentic assessment, whether for academia or the corporate world is in my belief instrumental in preparing students for the types of tasks required in the real world, especially when those activities can be made personally relevant and meaningful. In choosing the artifacts to represent my learning of authentic assessment I looked for projects that were problem-centered rather than content-oriented, and were applicable to each theme of my learning. The Artifacts Themselves
The first artifact chosen is titled 21st Century Skills, which is a video promoting the arts as a vehicle for creative learning through which I was able to assimilate and accommodate new knowledge. This artifact also represents a new area of learning and experimentation that actually worked in its original design. Additionally, the technical elements were far more complex than prior projects, and its inclusion highlights the vast possibilities video holds for both teaching and learning alike.
The second artifact is a PowerPoint presentation and a written paper completed for a consulting project that evaluated a multi-level marketing company's online training program, titled Online Training in Computers & Marketing. In contrast to the first whose focus was on the promotion of creative learning through authentic activities, this second project looks at evaluating an online corporate training program using the ADDIE model to determine its level of success. Moreover, my research of instructional design practices and online training programs led me to develop a small study of my own to determine the effectiveness and useability of an informal online training site. I have chosen this project in my learning portfolio for its relevance to current practice and as a example of an authentic task that gave me my first experience using instructional design techniques. The final artifact, An Assessment Framework: Social Learning in an Online Environment has become part of my learning portfolio as an example of a framework for informal assessment that was created in Online Learning in Adult Education. In addition to being my first experience in designing such a framework, it also represents an area of learning in which I struggled, and so this topic necessarily required a great deal more research and instructor assistance than any of my other projects. As a result I do not think it is my best work, but my research did lead me to the discovery of a paper that discussed behaviorism, constructivism, and cognitive psychology in the design of instructional practice (Mishra, 2002), which greatly aided in my comprehension and completion of the task. As well, these artifacts serve to illustrate the progression my knowledge has taken in this subject area at different periods of time during my course of study. |