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Situative theories of knowing and participatory approaches to learning and assessment were used to offer a big open online course on Educational Assessment using Google CourseBuilder in 2013. The course was started by 160 students and completed by 60, with relatively extensive instructor interaction with individual learners. This yielded much higher levels of engagement and learning than are typical of open or conventional online courses. The course was further refined and offered a second time in 2014, where it was started by 76 students and completed by 22, with a much lower level of support. Comparable levels of engagement and learning were obtained, suggesting that this participatory approach to learning and assessment can indeed be managed with more typical instructor support. Nonetheless, additional automation and streamlining is called for if the model is to eventually be used in massive online courses with thousands of students or as an autonomous self-paced open course.
Hickey et al. (Mon,) studied this question.