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Rethinking online assessments as social experiences with Todd Moran

Todd Moran joins the show to talk about the social aspect of assessment including peer assessment, handling pushback from learning designers and other stakeholders, and some more effective methods of online assessments that quizzes.

About Todd Moran

Todd’s professional career has spanned start-ups to non-profits and large multinationals, and his current role at NovoEd as the Chief Learning Strategist. From the megatrends in learning and enterprise collaboration to technology evaluation and implementation, to the ‘people’ side of organisational change and talent development, he covers the gamut of understanding what it takes to enable a successful digital workplace and deep employee engagement.

Todd holds a B.A. in Organisational Psychology from Middlebury College, and an M.A. in Information & Learning Technology from the University of Colorado.

Key takeaways:

  • Assessment needs to be completely relevant and incorporates socialisation. Firstly, we often miss the nature of embedding some of those assessments in the specificity of the context they should reside within. Secondly, the social aspect gives a more holistic view of assessment, that is not just individual knowledge.
  • Consider the gradient of effort when scaling assessment across an organisation. Think about lower points of entry that still return big value when it comes to casting a net wider socially, e.g. about who could assess one's work, products, tasks, etc.
  • Learning about work should be a team activity and we need to shift the perspective of learning designers and other stakeholders who think it’s just for individuals. Ask them questions such as “how applicable is the scenario or the experience or the intervention you're designing?“, and tie in the alignment to how that individual can then perform in a work setting.

Segmented time stamps:

  • [01:54] More effective ways of online assessments
  • [04:41] Considering the social aspect of learning
  • [08:14] What we mean by ‘assessment’
  • [10:46] Working with learning designers and other key stakeholders to shift their perspective
  • [14:52] Having an education mindset
  • [18:33] Making assessment more social

Links from the podcast:


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