We’ve known for years that if we want to move learning environments forward we need to move to loosely coupled assessment. We need to separate gradebooks and rosters from course materials and communities. Scott Leslie argued this point eloquently over a lunch I shared with him and others at OpenEd, and I’ve argued similar points much less eloquently in the past.

In OCW production, the need is particularly strong. At least some of the duplicated work in OCW production is necessitated by the fact the course materials have to be produced in an LMS (because that’s where the student roster lives) as well as on the broader web (which can’t talk to the roster).

One sustainable model would have the OCW site replace the repository function of the LMS entirely. In such a system, certain materials might be made available only to rostered students because of IP concerns, but these materials would live side by side on a single courseware site, and eliminate the “double-entry book-keeping” issue that many institutions currently have.

But to get to this LMS-free world, professors need access to the one piece that has traditionally been the sole domain of the LMS — a gradebook. And if developers of courseware want to structure permissions based on that roster, the gradebook needs to be able to communicate with multiple systems.

Luckily, Jon Mott is working on just such an application. He took a moment at the conference to talk about it with me:

Jon later commented on the crowdvine site for the conference that the feedback he got on this project at OpenEd was extremely positive. We’ll let you know more as the project progresses.
Â