Scientific seminar: "Emerging Assesment Models in Social, Networked and Open forms of learning"

Introducing the seminar

This seminar is part of the STEEPNESS project. It focuses on how to assess learning in open environments with varying degrees of social interactions.A wide range of diverse stakeholders in Higher Education including students, teachers, pedagogues and decision makers will collaborate to build on existing knowledge on evaluation and facilitate the emergence of new ideas and ways of assessing. Relying on collective intelligence, we will work with speculative methods. 

Why is this important? 

There are many open and social ways to learn— think of open educational resources and practices, hackathons, fab labs, associative contexts, etc.— but the methods for evaluating these learning experiences are still being developed or need better visibility. Assessing these types of learning can be particularly challenging, especially within the scope of institutional quality frameworks. 

What are open and social forms of learning? 

Openness is an umbrella term. In this context, what is relevant is that it is associated with values of access, transparency, agency and sharing. In terms of activity, similar to a community of practice, it starts from a joint interest in a specific object and/or practice. It grows into a form of self-governing activity, opening a space for a commons. Furthermore, it is based on establishing judicious connections among humans and artefacts and focuses on collectively enriching the object and/or practice of interest.  

Social learning is a different way of thinking about how we learn. In very simple terms, rather than simply passing on information or repeating what we have been told, social learning involves actively building knowledge and skills through meaningful interactions with others. It encourages exploration, creativity, and the ability to cope with uncertainty.  

Guiding questions: 

The main questions we will explore in the seminar are: What does assessment mean?  How to assess learning in open and social environments?  

How to decide whether to participate? 

You are a teacher, lecturer, researcher, pedagogical advisor, decision maker or student in open and distant learning and/or an expert in assessment methods . Within this frame, you recognize yourself in one of the following profiles and will provide some material upfront:  

1. The learning assessment system I am dreaming of looks like…  

2. I have heard about an assessment system which looks like … and would like to know how it works 

3. I know a theory and/or have developed an assessment system I would like to share with you as a best practice

Scientific Committee:  Barbara Class, Mathilde Panes, Henrietta Carbonel, Jean-Michel Jullien

Date: June 16-17, 2025 

Place: UniDistance Suisse, Schinerstrasse 18, 3900 Brig-Glis, Switzerland 

Language: Mainly English, but everybody can express themselves in their own (national) language