Currently reading: Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous Course”
As I am thinking more and more about the details of our upcoming MOOC on “Teaching for Sustainability”, I am less and less convinced that I actually want to have automated certification at the end. So Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous Course” looks like they might have some useful insights!
Granted, my MOOC wouldn’t be graded anyway, but Emerson (2026) ungraded an online undergraduate course they taught. Students still did (ungraded) quizzes which they could repeat as often as needed, wrote reflections that got fast and detailed instructor feedback, and completed writing assignments, for which they had a rubric to clarify expectations and on which they got instructor feedback. At the end of the course, they suggested their own grade, which, if the teacher disagreed with their suggestion, the teacher could change after discussing with them. But that turned out not to be neccessary.
So how was the experience for the students? In a survey at the end of the course, students reported that this approach made them feel less pressure than usually, and let them focus on understanding and learning. Some students reported enjoying learning for its own sake. Students also mentioned the increased autonomy they felt over the learning process, and how that made them intrinsically motivated, which was then reflected in the quality of their work (also because they knew that, since they would be grading their work themselves, it would be graded fairly, but they would also have to defend the grade). But of course, experiencing this for the first time introduced also uncertainty and stress for students. Students also pointed out that ungrading might not work so well in science, maths, medicine, and similar subjects (but they did not have direct experience of that, so were just guessing; and the literature says that ungrading can work well there, too).
Finally, Emerson (2026) reflects that in the future, the communication about the grading scheme could be improved, and that it might be helpful for students to practice grading their own work throughout the semester.
So what does that mean for our MOOC? I feel like automated certification (based on quizzes, rubric-based peer-feedback on assignments, etc, but without the instructor having to assess anything) is pretty much dead. Why would any employer want to see a certificate that could so easily have been obtained using GenAI and no own thought? What is relevant is whether someone has acquired knowledge, skills, and competences in a course. Then it would make a lot more sense to design the course in a way that participants build a portfolio of personally meaningful traces of learning, which they assess against criteria, so they could show artifacts from that — together with their discussion of the criteria and their own conclusion about their learning — to the future employer or whoever wants to see evidence of mastery. The portfolio can be meaningful in itself, both because it can be a collection of products that participants can use for their own teaching, but also because it is fun to reflect on your own learning over time and see it documented (she writes, looking back at almost 13 years of blogging [AND: since yesterday, if you click the search button in the top right, you will see a coral reef appear! So excited about that!!!]). So I think rather than dropping assessment completely, suggesting some form of self-assessment along those lines might be a good idea to explore further.
Emerson, K. G. (2026). “It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous Course. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 14, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.14.3
