Ninety-five students sat an examination at the University of Canberra in November 2011.
They had forty minutes.
They also had the Web.
The instructions for the Business, Politics and Sport exam told them that online communication tools were available, asked them to use hyperlinks for sources, invited them to acknowledge colleagues, and said that transparent collaboration was welcome.
The stated focus was their ability to discover and share information.
That is an unusual place to begin a story about assessment.
The exam did not remove the Web, networks or source use from the conditions. It made them part of the task.
The students still had to produce answers. They still had a deadline. They were still being assessed.
But the assessment was asking a different question.
The task did not ask students only to produce answers. It explicitly made discovery, source use and sharing part of what was being tested.
Keith Lyons thought the forty minutes were intense and exciting. Ninety-five students submitted their work despite slow Wi-Fi and some computer problems.
That tells us the examination happened and that the group completed it.
It does not tell us that the design produced better learning, that it was fairer than another examination, or that open access automatically led to good source use.
What it shows is more modest, and more interesting.
In this exam, finding information, following links, acknowledging sources and working transparently with others became visible inside the assessment.
A different kind of evidence
Five years later, the assessment object looked very different.
In March 2016, eight students in Sport Informatics and Analytics at the University of Canberra were submitting their first ePortfolios for formative assessment.
They were not all using the same platform. Some chose WordPress, Wix or Google Sites; others used Mahara. Jocelyn Mara was guiding the cohort through what Keith described as a deliberately non-linear, self-directed learning journey.
The portfolios mattered to Keith because they could make a learner’s developing thought world visible over time.
The 2011 examination produced answers at a particular moment.
A living portfolio can accumulate.
It can hold a record of choices, reflections, sources, representations and changes. It can become something the learner and others return to rather than something submitted once and then left behind.
Keith saw possibilities in that continuity. He described the portfolios as opportunities for conversations about learning and wrote hopefully about their capacity to invite students to become agents in their own learning.
The hope needs to remain a hope.
Platform choice is not proof of agency. Constructing an ePortfolio is not proof of personal flourishing. A designed opportunity for reflection does not establish that reflection changed what a learner understood or did.
And the formal assessment structure had not disappeared.
The students had another formative assessment point ahead of them and would present their ePortfolios for summative assessment at the end of the semester.
That detail matters.
The movement in Clyde Street was not from assessment to no assessment.
It was toward a form of assessment in which evidence could accumulate while learning was still happening.
Reviewing what has finished
By September 2016, Keith was trying to name the temporal problem more directly.
He called the post Connecting understanding, learning and performance pre-view and described what followed as thoughts in progress.
The phrase matters because he was not announcing a completed system.
He was worrying at a familiar structure.
The staff in his project participated in an annual performance review process. Keith described it as anxiety-producing, consuming staff attention and operating essentially as a compliance exercise.
Review looked backwards.
A period of work had happened. Evidence was gathered. An account was made. A judgement followed.
Keith wanted to know whether that sequence could be altered.
He began experimenting with another word: pre-view.
The difference was not that the past should be ignored. Reflection still mattered. Evidence still mattered. Formal judgement still mattered.
The difference was whether the evidence had finished its work once it had accounted for what had already happened.
Could an assessment conversation also help a person articulate what they were becoming able to understand and do?
Could the account of learning become formative rather than only retrospective?
Could it make time for what came next?
For Keith, this question met several intellectual lineages at once.
His longstanding engagement with Teaching for Understanding gave him the language of performances of understanding: actions through which a learner both shows and advances understanding.
Chris Trevitt, Anne Macduff and Aliya Steed supplied another problem: warrant.
Their use of warrant concerned high-stakes summative assessment — the certificates, diplomas and other judgements that testify to achievement. They also explored the possibility that ePortfolios might support both learning and warranting.
Keith did not own those frameworks or findings.
What he did was put them into contact with his own concern about review.
The result was a demanding proposition.
Perhaps a portfolio could be more than a repository of evidence.
Perhaps a conversation could be more than a retrospective explanation.
Perhaps a performance could be both evidence of understanding and part of the process through which understanding advances.
And perhaps pre-view could describe an assessment relationship oriented toward how a person might continue, rather than only how a completed period should be judged.
Keith’s wording remained deliberately provisional. He wrote of hope, potential and possibility. He imagined pre-view as narrative, formative and nourished by critical friendship and appreciative enquiry.
That is not evidence that pre-view worked.
It is evidence that Keith was trying to redesign the purpose and timing of assessment without pretending that standards, judgement or warrant could simply disappear.
The difficulty of warrant
This is where the idea becomes harder than a simple contrast between bad review and good pre-view.
In the formal settings Keith was writing about, assessment still had to do more than encourage reflection.
Trevitt, Macduff and Steed’s use of warrant kept high-stakes summative judgement in view: certificates and diplomas still testify to achievement.
Keith’s September 2016 post does not solve that problem.
It keeps it visible.
That is why warrant matters.
If the purpose were only personal expression, a learner could simply tell a story.
If the purpose were only summative judgement, an institution could simply demand evidence against a standard.
Keith was interested in the more difficult middle ground: whether the same evidence could support continuing learning and still carry enough weight to warrant a formal judgement.
The ePortfolio was attractive because it could contain representations of practice, engagement with ideas and literature, reflective commentary and connections among them.
But a portfolio does not become trustworthy merely because it is rich, personal or digital.
Nor does authenticity remove the problem of judgement.
The source Keith was drawing on treated warrant as a serious high-stakes matter. His own proposal had to live with that seriousness.
The future-facing move therefore did not release assessment from responsibility.
It increased the design problem.
What should a learner be asked to make visible?
What would count as evidence of understanding?
Who would judge it?
How could the judgement support further learning without becoming so diffuse that it ceased to warrant anything at all?
Clyde Street does not provide a finished answer.
It provides a reason to keep the questions together.
Showing and advancing understanding
Keith returned to the problem again in August 2017.
This time the immediate prompt was Mark Upton’s concern that coaches and analysts could spend disproportionate time analysing, editing and preparing material for the classroom instead of designing purposeful activity on the field.
The prompt took Keith back to David Perkins, Tina Blythe and Project Zero.
Their performance perspective on understanding had stayed with him from the 1990s.
Understanding, in that work, was not simply possession of information. It involved being able to do thought-demanding things with a topic and to represent it in new ways. Performances of understanding could both show a learner’s grasp and advance it.
That final part is important for assessment.
If an assessment only asks a learner to display what is already complete, it sits after learning.
If the performance through which understanding is assessed also stretches, tests or reorganises that understanding, assessment can happen inside learning.
Keith connected this to authentic activity in training environments.
The framework he was using included generative topics, understanding goals, understanding performances and ongoing assessment. The source itself described the approach as a guide rather than a prescription, leaving practitioners room to design for their own settings.
Keith carried that openness into coaching.
He imagined coaches being supported through opportunities to perform understanding in the environments where their practice actually occurred.
Again, the limit is important.
The 2017 post does not show that such a design improved coaching. The relearn Team Sports journey Keith mentioned was still prospective. Project Zero’s work belongs to its authors and context; Keith’s connection to coaching was a connection, not a transfer of proven outcomes.
But the direction of travel is clear enough.
Assessment was moving closer to activity.
Evidence was moving closer to practice.
And the distinction between showing understanding and developing understanding was becoming harder to maintain.
What changed?
Across these Clyde Street sources, there is no single assessment model.
The 2011 open-computer exam, the 2016 ePortfolio course, the later pre-view proposition and the return to performances of understanding are different designs in different settings.
They should not be flattened into a planned progression.
But they do create a recognisable sequence of questions.
What happens if access to information is treated as part of the assessment rather than a threat to it?
What happens if evidence accumulates while learning continues?
What happens if review becomes a conversation not only about where someone has been but about how they might continue?
Question to carry
What happens if the act of showing understanding can also advance it?
The most important continuity may be that Keith kept moving assessment closer to learning itself.
Not by removing standards.
Not by claiming that every learner should be left to choose whatever they wanted.
Not by replacing summative judgement with encouragement.
He kept asking whether evidence could do more than certify a completed past.
That leaves a productive tension at the centre of the story.
In these sources, formal judgement never disappears. Warrant still carries high-stakes consequences, and ongoing assessment still asks what counts as evidence of understanding.
At the same time, an assessment can shape what a learner notices, practises, explains, connects and imagines next.
The question is not whether we should choose judgement or learning.
It is whether the design of judgement can itself participate in learning without losing the responsibility to judge.
Keith did not resolve that tension in Clyde Street.
He made it harder to ignore.
And pre-view became one of the names he gave to the possibility that evidence might face in two directions at once:
back towards what has been done,
and forward towards what a person might yet become able to understand and do.
Keith Lyons, “BPS2011: Open Computer Exam” — 11/11/10
Keith Lyons, “ePortfolios, Pedagogy and Personal Flourishing” — 16/03/18
Keith Lyons, “Connecting understanding, learning and performance pre-view” — 16/09/16
Keith Lyons, “Understanding” — 17/08/22
Source and ownership note
The Business, Politics and Sport open-computer examination is Keith Lyons and colleagues’ enacted course design. Jocelyn Mara’s guiding role in the 2016 Sport Informatics and Analytics cohort is hers, and the students’ portfolios and experiences remain theirs. The Ontario Distance Education and Training Network and Stephen Downes retain ownership of the wider MOOC/ePortfolio observations cited by Keith. Teaching for Understanding, Project Zero, David Perkins, Tina Blythe and related authors retain ownership of their frameworks and findings. Chris Trevitt, Anne Macduff and Aliya Steed retain ownership of the warrant/ePortfolio argument. Mark Upton and Ric Shuttleworth retain ownership of their work and the relearn Team Sports context. Keith owns the connections, designs, interpretations and pre-view proposition he made in Clyde Street.
This article does not claim that the four sources form a planned assessment-development programme, that open-computer assessment produces superior learning, that platform choice proves learner agency, that ePortfolios cause flourishing, that pre-view is an evaluated replacement for annual review, or that authentic performances automatically make assessment valid.
.
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “Exam” — 11/11/10
Keith Lyons, “Eportfolios Pedagogy And Personal Flourishing” — 16/03/18
Keith Lyons, “Connecting Understanding Learning And Performance Pre View” — 16/09/16
Keith Lyons, “Understanding” — 17/08/22