"The Mozilla Foundation and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU), among others, are working to create an alternative - and recognized - form of certification that combines merit-earned badges with an open framework. The Open Badges Project will allow skills and competencies to be tracked, assessed, and showcased."
Deakin trying out a MOOC with some interesting assessment ideas - mainly assessed via peer review and awarding of badges, formal credit on payment of $495 fee involves an interview with the student as well as learning artefacts.
"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."
First stable release in 2003 - the following description sounds uncannily familiar!
"iPeer is an open source web application application that allows instructors to develop and deliver rubric-based peer evaluations, to review and release student comments, to build progress report forms online, and to analyze evaluation results. iPeer features a built-in user management system, data import/export, and an easy-to-use installer."