Using the Community to create certifications
Howard Dierking has published a really interesting post entitled "Community Based Development - Let's Talk". (Thanks to Trikah for point to this.) Go read the post, then come back here.
I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Howard during the Objective Domain development phase of the Installation/Administration of TFS certification last fall. He is very passionate about what he does, and definitely wants to make the best product possible (in this case, the best certifications). In the above post, he hypothesizes about creating a more open, community driven approach to creating the domain and questions for a certification.
At first glance, I kind of like the idea. I could see using a wiki to drive developing the object domain. And I'm sure the question pool could turn out pretty big, especially for a topic people were interested in. And if people know they are going to get some sort of credit listing for it, they will probably try and make good questions up.
But there are also some issues as well. By bringing in domain experts and paying them for their time, they know they are there to do a job, and stay focused on doing that job. Going a more community route, it will probably take longer to define the domain, and to generate questions.
Even after the domain and questions are generated, you are still going to have to bring in experts to verify all of it. That said, it will probably be a lot cheaper and lot easier for the experts to take a lot of existing content and pare it down than to start from scratch.
But overall, I'd love to see a proof of concept for this. Heck, let's try and do the next TFS exam this way. I would say I am engaged enough and interested enough in the idea to try it.
I've got more thoughts, but I'm interested to see if anyone else picks up on this idea, and what their thoughts are.