By Michael Feldstein. In the first part of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that supports conversation-based courses. In the second part, I brought up a use case of a kind of faculty professional development course that works as a distributed flip, based on our forthcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning. In the next two posts, I’m going to go into some aspects of the system design. More...

By Michael Feldstein. In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:

1. Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
2. Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
3. Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
4. Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.

I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. More...

By Michael Feldstein. Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind. CBE is loosely tied to family of pedagogical methods, perhaps the most important of which at the moment is mastery learning. More...