Ed & Tech must-reads 18th Aug 2026

Universities Experiment with Hidden Grades from DailyNous

In addition to death and taxes, in education, at some point, assessment is inevitable. After all, how do we know whether learning has occurred? (I sense some hackles rising out there but bear with me). In our measure everything paradigm, the question of whether grades help or harm student engagement and motivation is being asked with incremental stridency. Do students cheat in part because they feel that they are in competition with their peers and they don’t want to risk taking the chance that their peers aren’t cheating? The idea of competency-based grading or other forms of ungrading isn’t new. Either students learned enough or they didn’t. This works well enough to a point but, organisationally at least, there can be a need for student progress to be tracked and compared. Scholarships, being allowed to play sport and eligibility for further learning all demand grades. This post describes work underway at the University of Michigan to maintain grades but to only tell students whether they passed or failed, in an attempt to get them to deprioritise numbers and focus on knowledge. It’s early days but worth following.

 Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity from Whatever

John Scalzi is clever science fiction writer with a wry sense of humour and a strong appreciation of the form. He also maintains an entertaining social media presence, which is where I came across the link to this post. In the post, he compares the use of GenAI to the 2000’s rhythm video game Guitar Hero which featured a guitar shaped controller that let you mash buttons and “strum” in time with shapes on the screen as classic rock songs played. (I will confess that I enjoyed a bit of time on Guitar Hero in my day). At the core of his entertaining rant is the idea that while you can use GenAI to seem creative, creativity actually requires work and time. It requires friction. Nothing radical in this but it is a story told well. (His daughter wrote a response piece to this - not defending GenAI but defending Guitar Hero as a thing which requires time and work to get good at too).

Meso and macro-level impacts from implementing open badges and microcredentials—A scoping review from Journal of Open, Distance and Digital Education

I miss the days when trying to find ways to make digital badges the next big thing in learning and teaching was the most wicked problem we faced in the ed & tech space. How might we get people to take them seriously, where can they be displayed which is visible and trustworthy, how do we deal with the extreme views of the marketing team about what is and is not an appropriate use of the university logo? Evidently they are still chugging along in parts of the internet and this scoping review from three scholars at Brigham Young University (which is, I want to say, Mormon?) offers a handy overview of where these credentialling systems sit now. (Mainly in K-12 but they persist in corporate spaces)