The world is chaning at a very fast pace. It is hard to predict the future but there are several studies that etsimate that the world of work will change radically with the expansion of artificial intelligence, automation, and othe rtechnologies that we might not know of yet. Frey and Osborne (2013) opened the debate about occupations, skills and the future of work. In that paper they argued that one in two current occupation will not exist by 2030. After their work, many others followed the debate and they present new (less drastic) evidence in their 2016 report . Other mention that even up to 85% of jobs by 2030 have not been invented yet (Institute for the Future (IFTF), 2017). One way or the other, the implication for education and the world of work is simple: we need to keep learning, we need to train people to learn, to adapt ans continue learning throughout their life. This brings me to the topic at hand: formative and continuous assessment.

I was tought in a traditional classroom setting, with test and grades, what we called summative assessment. I believe that formative and continues assessments are essential tools to prepare students for the world of work.

As defined by the Eberly Center: “The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.“ As Professor Cope describes in the videos, continous assessment means that professors are now actually assessing students actual work instead of evaluating their memory at the end of a course.

I think this approach is very iportant from the student perspective. Formative learning in the form of peer review help students develop skills that will be valuable in the current and future world of work. the ability to constanly learnm adjust, imporve, adapt, are skills that the literature on the future of work agrees that will be essential in the future. 

There is a playlist of TedTalks that discusses lifelong learning in the new digital era.