Motivating STEM Engagement in Children, Families, and Communities

By Daniel Hickey

 This extended post is the second in a series of post about my work with non-profit STEM education start up called Iridescent.  In a previous post I describe their Curiosity Machine and an evaluation I carried out of a program designed to encourage families to complete Engineering Design Challenges on that website from home, after attending two-hour weekly evening workshops. In this post I explore the challenges that organizations like Iridescent and science museums face in attempting to motivate inquiry learning in informal contexts. I am also using this post as my weekly contribution to the graduate education class on motivation that I am currently teaching.

The Data of Learning: A Response to Martin Kurzweil's "Responsible Use of Student Data"

by James Willis

In mid-April, Stanford University hosted the "Learning Summit 2016: Inventing the Future of Higher Education." For those of us who study how the newer processes and protocols of using student data have ethical and legal consequences, one session in particular should be of interest: Marco Molinaro (UC Davis) moderated a panel on the "Responsible Use of Student Data for Individual and Organizational Improvement" which included speakers Martin Kurzweil (ITHAKA S+R), Mitchell Stevens (Stanford), and Kent Wada (UCLA). Kurzweil provided a recent blog posting summarizing the panel discussion, raising some important points.

Engaging Children and Families in Informal Science Learning

By Dan Hickey 

In this post, I share some things I have learned about the design of "semi-formal" science learning environments that I learned working with a remarkable science education non-profit in Los Angeles called Iridescent.

AERA and Open Digital Badges

by James Willis

The 2016 conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) will happen next week (April 8 - April 12) in Washington, D.C. There are some events related to open digital badges, so I'll discuss them briefly along with links to additional information. There is also an interesting disparity between the growing embrace of badges and the relatively little coverage at AERA.

Recognizing, Assessing, and Motivating Entrepreneurial Mindsets

By Dan Hickey

In this longer post, I explore some of the issues around recognizing and motivating an entrepreneurial "mindset" using digital badges. I am collaborating with Rebecca DeVasher at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Helen Chen at Stanford University. They and their colleagues are working with the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) on programs to help engineering students develop the dispositions needed to be a successful entrepreneur alongside their more conventional technical skills and problem solving ability.

2016 Developments at the Badge Alliance

by James Willis and Dan Hickey in conjunction with Nate Otto

At the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, there have been a number of changes at the Badge Alliance. In a recent blog posting, Nate Otto, Director of the Badge Alliance, sets out an ambitious agenda for 2016. Beyond the on-going work of supporting productive and evidence-rich badging projects, the Badge Alliance is also concentrating efforts on communicating across the various communities and providing technical support to the ecosystem. We summarize some of those initiatives here.

So maybe open badges can get you into Harvard (or Yale or Dartmouth) after all

By Daniel Hickey and James Willis

As summarized in Education Dive and reported in the Boston Globe, Harvard and 80 representatives from other Ivy League schools released a report arguing that admissions officers should give more attention to service-learning and volunteer activities. They recommended:

1. "Promoting more meaningful contributions to others, community service and engagement with the public good.
2. Assessing students' ethical engagement and contributions to others in ways that reflect varying types of family and community contributions across race, culture and class.
3. Redefining achievement in ways that both level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure."

Those of you who follow RMA can likely appreciate how much this means to us and where this post is going. Yup. Badges and assessment. That second recommendation is going to be a really tough one to implement. As we will elaborate in some length, open digital badges are intended to provide valid evidence of accomplishment outside of accredited contexts. Some new developments may allow them to serve precisely this function.

The Possibilities and Challenges of Dual Enrollment for Assessment and Beyond

By Dan Hickey
My colleague James Willis was kind enough to introduce me to Emily Swafford who is the Programs Manager at the American History Association.  I emailed Emily about our several promising forays into history education, including our work with Chris Hitchcock to develop new participatory online courses at Indiana University High School and our initial discussion of the Dual Enrollment courses supervised by Indiana University's Advance College Project.  It just so happens that the current issue of the AHA's news magazine Perspectives on History just published a timely special issue on dual enrollment that was full of ideas we care about here at RMA.  In particular, it illustrated the complex challenges that emerge for assessment around dual enrollment in general and in particular when states mandate things like DE and get directly involved in school curricula.

Resource and Repository for Open Badges

by James Willis

We are pleased to announce a repository for open badges projects, articles, case studies, and links to additional resources. Our website, Open Badges in Higher Ed, has launched and is now searchable on Google and other web browsers. This site is an on-going effort by the collaborators of the OBHE project at Indiana University.

Calculus PLAnet: Promising First steps in Participatory Supplemental Instruction in Mathematics

by Suraj Uttamchandani, Tristan Tager, and Daniel Hickey

We discuss our recent pilot of networked online approaches for providing supplemental instruction for learners in Calculus. This work responds to the raging debate over how to respond to underprepared college entrants who are at high risk for failing "gateway" introductory courses, particularly in STEM and composition. Placing such students in remedial Developmental Education (DE) courses generates tuition revenue and fits within the existing course structure. But decades of research show that this approach does not work and that many of these student never move from this "remedial ghetto" into credit-bearing courses, and fewer still go on to graduate. Most now argue for providing peer-assisted Supplemental Instruction (SI) to support all students in challenging gateway courses. But because SI does not generate tuition, it draws from existing instructional resources. Additionally, SI requires space, scheduling, and supervision that many schools struggle to sustain. In this blog post we introduce an alternative approach to supplemental instruction that draws from recent advances on participatory and networked approaches to online learning.