ComprehensiveLearnerRecord

Comprehensive Learner Record lists all your work and school wins.

The CLR tries to resolve the tension between learning and testing. Talk to teachers today, and they will complain (among other things) about balancing the burden of test requirements with kindling desires to learn. If you turn around and talk to admissions or human resources, they will complain about how little data they have when making their decisions.

The underlying goal of CLR is to granularize content to the point where mastery can be concretely ascertained, ie. instead of issuing grades on a scaled range, issue badges only when content is mastered. And instead of viewing testing as a tollgate, see it as an assurance method. ie. learners and teachers use it to make sure learners transition from one known good corpus of knowledge to the next.

That, unfortunately, is the sum total of CLR's hoped-for benefits.

Nobody knows how this will game out. There have been zero implementations evaluated in a testbed that we can all examine. EDUCAUSE / IMS should be taking their own transition assurance advice and doing the work to assure that CLR is a pareto improvement over the current system.

For example, one stated goal is put everyone's accomplishments online for everyone to see. However, we know that people routinely tailor applications and resumes for the viewer. CLR would likely obviate this -- which would you rather do, parse an ad-hoc document or just plug their CLR ID into your admissions/job matching AI?

Despite decades of education research, the propensity of major players still lies towards rolling out large unevaluated changesets and impacting millions of lives. They are failing us and their auditors should be failing them.