You’ve recently posed three interesting challenges for me and “the new Blackboard.” You asked whether we’d change our approach to the industry in some important ways. All require real thought and commitment, and I’ll share with you and your readers that I’m pondering these (and more) as I consider which positions I’ll focus on most in my early days.

Today I’ve shared a related announcement committing Bb to standards like Common Cartridge, both import and export, and LIS. It’s an important call that speaks directly to the questions of citizenship that have been questions for our direction. It also speaks to the issue of effort Bb will put forward to opening our platform. See My blog for my letter to our customers and note to the eLearning community.

I look forward to the road ahead on questions like these, working with my new colleagues here and with the community overall. In the meantime, never too late for you to join the conversation around standards at BbWorld in DC.

Ray

I don’t think it’s a good idea to automatically reject all assessment or data. And I do think that knee-jerk rejection does happen. But I also think that there are things about teaching and learning that can’t be measured that way, where even the attempt is harmful.

And (as I’m sure you know) the tendency among administrators and agencies is to rely only on those quantifiable metrics.

But it’s also possible to romanticize the intangible, and to use it as an excuse for an avoidance of facing the hard questions that have to be faced to improve teaching and learning.

And yes, I’m contradicting myself–it’s an issue where (even though I sometimes make strong claims in one direction or another) I can see both sides with some ambivalence.

I think that if you look at Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, at projects like the Visible Knowledge Project, you see that there are opportunities for “thick” description and analysis–for treating teaching and learning as a subject worthy of intense scholarly research. That way you can have assessment and measurement, and still value complexity and innovation and intangibles.