I'm really drawn to your thought about higher education as a designed engine of demotivation. This is something we often misrecognise as the engine misfiring, when in fact it's working entirely as it's designed to work. So this is really just a quick thank you for the post, and even more for the comment, which suddenly made some things much clearer to me. 

- Kate Bowles

@Kate - thanks! It's all down to that simple, innocent and then very wise decision a thousand years ago or more ago to have a single teacher teaching many people. All the rest follows naturally - courses, curricula, attendance requirements, discipline, timetables, accreditation and pedagogies based on the physical necessity of control. Throwing a bunch of people together in a closed space for a fixed time and expecting them to do something with that time is such a basic underpinning assumption that we rarely question it, and we tend to transfer it to our online learning too. There are lots of ways to overcome it and we have done so for centuries in things like PhDs (at least in some countries), projects, theses and many other embedded processes, but doing so at scale, especially in undergrad programs, has historically been tricky and expensive. Now that the physical constraints are not there any more and we live in a world of knowledge abundance, we need to grow out of the control mindset. I think that's the real promise of e-learning.

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- ClaytonWoura

I guess multiple choice questions are an efficient way of "measuring knowledge". There was a prof from U. Alberta who did studied the MCQs on Alberta Education's standardized tests (Grades 3, 6, 9 and diploma exams in Grade 12) and came to the conclusion that they tested reading more than content. To prove his point, he showed us the patterns in the test and then gave us questions from a Math 31 test. Even though most of the audience had not taken Math 31 (calculus), we were able to answer the questions and get about 60% based on our knowledge of how the test was constructed. The strategies were very similar to the strategies on the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, so that's how we taught test taking for achievement tests. 

Nice example, Mary. It suggests to me that they are often just a good way to measure knowledge of how to do MCQs!

I think objective tests are mostly OK for some basic fact-oriented subjects as long as they are used solely as a formative learning tool and not for accreditation. Even when you use tricks like confidence weightings to reduce the benefits of guessing to a minimum, they still tell us very little about what people can actually do, but they can in principle be a useful way for learners to figure out for themselves what they know about. Unfortunately, even when the marks count for nothing and they are the only people that will ever see the results, many learners still tend to try to game the system. I'm not sure whether that is in our nature or something we have learned, but it's weird.

As someone who read Tufte back in the '80s, I would venture that ALL infographics are worthless. ;-)

Indeed - though Tufte's career has been pretty much all about how to do infographics right and he has produced some of the best ones around.  Ironically, his website is an impenetrable, ugly, disorganized mess.