They are one-dimensional, subjective, non-standardized and unreliable. Most teachers would agree that there are better ways to evaluate students and assess their progress.  Students stress about grades and all agree that it kills collaboration and sharing. And yet we keep using them.  April is the time of year when colleges decide who to admit into their hallowed ranks.  This is the time when the panic about grades, GPAs and scores hits an all-time high.  Studies of Kuh, Pascarella & Terenzini, and others have established quite clearly that student engagement rather than grades is the most significant predictor of student success and retention. Engaged students are the ones who raise their hands in class to ask questions, who chat with their classmates, and who stay back to interact with their teachers.  They are the ones who join clubs, participate in sports, find a cause to champion, volunteer, and who help out in the community. This is important, right? Well then, where is this included in the curriculum and where does it appear on the transcript?

When was the last time you were offered a job based on your college transcript? When employers sift through entry-level applicants, they look beyond the GPA for evidence of teamwork, passion, problem solving, communications. And yet you will not find any of these attributes on the college transcript. These skills are developed during experiences outside the classroom: experiential learning, problem based learning, real life experiences, projects, co-ops. Our learner faces two challenges—to pick the right experience to learn these skills, and to produce credible documentation of these skills.

Today’s world is dynamically changing, technologically evolving, highly global, constantly online, and demandingly collaborative. Do we have educational experiences to train our young learners for this brave new world, a connectivist world where Google places encyclopedia facts at a eight year old’s fingertips, where online chats connect an Atlanta coed with an Ankara teen in seconds, a world where notions of privacy are being challenged by texting tweens. At OpenStudy, we asked ourselves what environment would make it is easy and fun for learners of all ages to prepare themselves for the new tomorrow? Our answer: Open Social Learning.

OpenStudy’s first disruptive innovation was to enable peer learning.  We set out to prove that learning could occur in an open social platform that offered peer learning help. The platform exceeded expectations. It has grown to over 100,000 users from 170 countries, and it offers a free, scalable, 24/7 learning help that users report is “addictive”. 80% of surveyed users report improved learning outcomes.

But there is more.  I’ve written countless letters of recommendation to help students apply for jobs, graduate school, and medical school by evaluating and documenting soft skills. I could see something remarkable emerge on our peer learning platform. Students began building and demonstrating these very skills. They learned to articulate their questions and answers, to maintain courtesy and openness, to work together in teams. They were truly passionate about learning. Some became leaders and offered support and mentoring.

Watching the interactions on OpenStudy, we realized that this ecosystem was just the right environment to develop key soft skills: helpfulness, courtesy, teamwork, problem solving, engagement, to name a few.  Today, OpenStudy is a global extracurricular extraordinaire, experiential learning for the 21st century, with access for all.

SmartScore is OpenStudy’s bold new initiative to challenge the traditional notions of intelligence normally quantified by grades. SmartScore will report on skills and competencies demonstrated on our platform that are relevant and meaningful for both student and workplace success. SmartScore is a 21st century version of real world intelligence.

We are hacking education and rethinking evaluation and assessment. You can think of it as going beyond grades. We call it a SmartScore.

Join us for our SmartScore launch on April 17th at the Education Innovation Summit to learn more.

Got your SmartScore?

Our venture OpenStudy is unique. We call it open social learning. Help is always available for all the learners in the world, who raise their hands and ask for help. We offer a highly scaleable, low cost, global solution to the problem of providing learning help through an open social platform for peer-to-peer learning.

We have proven this disruptive model over and over again, to thousands of learners. Today there are 100,000 registered users, from over 40 partnering institutions including a who’s who list of the MITOCWs and OpenYales to the community college systems of West Hills and Piedmont. Our users ask over 1000 questions a day in Math alone and are usually helped within 5 minutes. Our impact on learning: 80% of our users surveyed reported that using OpenStudy had helped them gain a better understanding of their course material. And there are stories like Sergio’s.

Our solution is really blindingly obvious especially to anyone with a teenager. Give them a Facebook like social site and the social interactions will then lead to engagement, the peer to peer learning creates a win-win scenario and users complain happily that they are addicted. Addicted to math! When was the last time you heard that?

As satisfying as this is, there is more. As our users engage with one another, young with old, the middle schooler with the MIT engineer, American, the Pakistani, the Tanzanian, the Turkish, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the black, the white, brown… they learn to interact, be courteous, they learn to be helpful, they learn to work together, to communicate. For the most active of our users, OpenStudy becomes their passion.

Communication, Teamwork, Passion, Helpfulness.

What does that sound like to you?

To us it was apparent that in our social learning platform, we had also created an ecosystem where our users could move beyond subject matter expertise to learning soft skills that matter. They were moving from the mind to the heart. Think of it as learning things that are not captured on a grade. Not only do our users practice these important skills of the heart, we can then report on on what they have learnt. With crowd sourcing, game mechanics and analytics, we can report on teamwork, problem solving, and most of all the elusive attribute, but in a way the most important: passion! You and I know this should have been taught in school, somehow? Right? But tragically, all too often it isn’t.

And finally, this is my core belief. In education, what lies between failure and success is a human. A teacher, a mentor, a friend, a peer. I believe all the technology being developed today will not solve the problems of education if it does not deliberately and purposefully include the social element. And I believe in the power of open social learning systems to solve some of education’s biggest problems.

Here is my Call to Action. Come experience OpenStudy for yourself. Be a Hero to a Sergio. Take 10 minutes to teach 10. And you may well learn something too.

Do you have a story like Sergio’s you’d like to share? Or perhaps you’re the ‘Hero’ in this story? Well, we’d love to hear it! Go to this link and tell us your #Take10Teach10 story!

OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and the Open Education movement is addressing this question of access by providing millions access to high quality courses developed in the best institutes of higher learning like MIT and Johns Hopkins.  And yet is that enough?  Anyone, whether educator or student, knows that learners always need help, and learning alone is, well, boring.  In the Gates Foundation “Silent Epidemic” study, 88% of the dropouts studied had passing grades.  They could have passed, but even in a school were too bored to finish.  When you consider distance or online learning you just ring in the death knell.  As George Siemens says of online courses, “Great video and talented presenters. My only complaint: I’d like to interact with others who are viewing the resources. Creating a one-way flow of information significantly misses the point of interacting online.” In the same Gates Foundation study, researchers learned that 47% of dropouts say “classes are not interesting.” Other studies show 60% find video lectures “boring” and 60% read less when using e-textbooks.  These are the key problems of education: how to bring help to online learners, how to scale it, and how to add interaction so learners are kept engaged.

In my talk at OCW Consortium Global 2011 meeting last week at MIT, I raised these issues. I talked about the notion of Open Social Learning and how it could solve these two problems.  The solutions are based on some wonderful and established work in the learning sciences.  Leve and Wenger (1991) proposed the theory of a community of practice where members come together with a common passion or a need to do something, to learn something.  In such a community, learning is enhanced through interactions, encouragement, role models and support.  Peer-to-peer learning allows learners to help one another, benefitting both the learners and the tutors (Fuchs, 1997). Best of all, it is scalable to the millons.

Our Open Social Learning solution to these three problems of education is therefore elegantly simple. In this solution OpenCourseWare courses are augmented by a community of learners who help one another, support one another and learn together as they socialize and spend time together online. Not only is this solution validated by educational research, it is also eminently scaleable because you are not dependent on hiring tutors or teachers to spend time assisting self learners.  The community helps one another.  Open Social Learning also fits right in with what our digital millenials want to do: hang out online for hours!  Why not get them talking about math instead of … well, let’s not go there.

Our solution is available at OpenStudy.com.  We think of it as Massively Multiplayer Online Learning. What do you think?