[We weren't sure where the best place to share this was. Please let us know if there's an Education related mailing list of forum for the jQuery community.]
School of Webcraft is a community offering and developing a set of peer-driven courses on open web development freely available via
Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) in partnership with
Mozilla. We've had a number of jQuery courses and study groups set up within School of Webcraft. We'd like to invite the jQuery community to help improve these popular offerings and in particular to help us develop the criteria for peer-assesment on jQuery competencies.
Together with the
Open Badges project we're developing
an assessment and badge pilot with the goal of providing
alternative pathways to certification and credentialing. Learners can take a series of peer-reviewed assessments to demonstrate their skills, completing assessment successfully earns them badges they can share with stakeholders such as potential employers. Currently the badge pilot is available to School of Webcraft participants.
We feel these efforts will not only further the impact of informal and peer learning channels, but also give us the opportunity to be further innovate with assessments. We are working hard to create assessments that are authentic and relevant to web developers, to capitalize on their existing portfolio where possible and to inspire continued learning and growth during the assessment process.
Assessments we have piloted so far have avoided standard multiple choice, but instead are based around challenges or exercises and narratives, with an aligned rubric to assess against. Here are two examples of two different levels of assessments we are currently running:
We are writing you to enlist your help in creating/identifying additional assessments for both Beginners and Advanced jQuery badges for the second phase of the badge pilot.
By helping us out on this pilot you'll be developing tangible and meaningful ways for employers and web developers to measure and identify jQuery skills beyond the vague "rockstar" status. In recognition of involvement in the pilot you will be listed and linked as advisors for the relevant badges.
We would benefit greatly from your insight into what the key elements of a rubric should be, as well as ideas around potential challenges or exercises. The model we have been using is:
- Assessment challenge/instructions
- Rubric to assess against (aka, "A jQuery Expert is someone who...."
Again, please see the links above as examples of the model we have been currently using. We are not adverse to other ideas or models, but we do want to continue to strive for authentic and highly relevant assessments wherever possible.
We are moving very quickly with this so please let us know in this forum channel if you have some ideas you can pass along.
Thanks in advance for your help with this important effort.
Erin Knight, Badge and Assessment Lead, Mozilla and P2PU
and
Pippa Buchanan, School of Webcraft Community Lead, Mozilla and P2PU
To become further involved with the School of Webcraft please join our
discussion list or create or participate in
study groups or courses.