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Views: Accreditation 2.0 - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eaton accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 22 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The first major conversation is led by the academic and accreditation communities themselves. It focuses on how accreditation is addressing accountability, with particular emphasis on the relationship (some would say tension, or even conflict) between accountability and institutional improvement.
  • The second conversation is led by critics of accreditation who question its effectiveness in addressing accountability
  • The third conversation is led by federal officials who also focus on the gatekeeping role of accreditation.
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  • All are based on a belief that accreditation needs to change, though in what way and at what pace is seen differently
  • The emerging Accreditation 2.0 is likely to be characterized by six key elements. Some are familiar features of accreditation; some are modifications of existing practice, some are new: Community-driven, shared general education outcomes. Common practices to address transparency. Robust peer review. Enhanced efficiency of quality improvement efforts. Diversification of the ownership of accreditation. Alternative financing models for accreditation.
  • The Essential Learning Outcomes of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Voluntary System of Accountability of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities all provide for agreement across institutions about expected outcomes. This work is vital as we continue to address the crucial question of “What is a college education?”
  • peer review can be further enhanced through, for example, encouraging greater diversity of teams, including more faculty and expanding public participation
  • Accreditation 2.0 can include means to assure more immediate institutional action to address the weaknesses and prevent their being sustained over long periods of time.
  • Judith Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which is a national advocate for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation. CHEA has 3,000 degree-granting colleges and universities as members and recognizes 59 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations.
  • Gary Brown on 22 Jan 10
     
    The way the winds are blowing
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Views: Accreditation's Accidental Transformation - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...eaton accountability accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Why the national attention? Why the second-guessing of the accreditation decisions? It is part of the accidental transformation of accreditation.
  • Academic quality assurance and collegiality -- the defining features of traditional accreditation -- are, at least for now, taking a backseat to consumer protection and compliance with law and regulation. Government and the public expect accreditation to essentially provide a guarantee that students are getting what they pay for in terms of the education they seek.
  • Blame the powerful demand that, above all, colleges and universities provide credentials that lead directly to employment or advancement of employment. Driven by public concerns about the difficult job market and the persistent rise in the price of tuition, accrediting organizations are now expected to assure that the colleges, universities and programs they accredit will produce these pragmatic results.
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  • The worth of higher education is determined less and less through the professional judgments made by the academic community. The deference at one time accorded accrediting organizations to decide the worth of colleges and universities is diminished and perhaps disappearing.
  • Do we know the consequences of this accidental transformation? Are we prepared to accept them? These changes may be unintended, but they are dramatic and far-reaching. Is this how we want to proceed? Judith S. Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
  • Gary Brown on 11 Aug 10
     
    It is this discussion that programs that approach accreditation perfunctorily need to attend.
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News: More Meaningful Accreditation - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...accredit accreditation portfolios
shared by Gary Brown on 22 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ts most distinctive feature is that it would clearly separate "compliance" from "improvement." Colleges would be required to build "portfolios" of data and materials, documenting (through more frequent peer reviews) their compliance with the association's many standards, with much of the information being made public. On a parallel track, or "pathway," colleges would have the flexibility to propose their own projects or themes as the focus of the self-improvement piece of their accreditation review, and would be judged (once the projects were approved by a peer team) by how well they carried out the plan. (Colleges the commission deems to be troubled would have a "pathway" chosen for them, to address their shortcomings.)
  • educe the paperwork burden on institutions (by making the portfolio electronic and limiting the written report for the portfolio to 50 pages), and make the process more valuable for colleges by letting them largely define for themselves where they want to improve and what they want to accomplish.
  • "We want to make accreditation so valuable to institutions that they would do it without Title IV," she said in an interview after the presentation. "The only way we can protect the improvement piece, and make it valuable to institutions to aim high, is if we separate it from the compliance piece."
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  • Mainly what happens in the current structure, she said, is that the compliance role is so onerous and so dominates the process that, in too many cases, colleges fail to get anything meaningful out of the improvement portion. That, she said, is why separating the two is so essential.
  • s initially conceptualized, the commission's revised process would have institutions build electronic portfolios made up of (1) an annual institutional data update the accreditor already uses, (2) a collection of "evidence of quality and capacity" drawn from existing sources (other accrediting reports), federal surveys and audits, and a "50-page, evidence-based report that demonstrates fulfillment of the criteria for accreditation," based largely on the information in (1) and (2), commission documents say. A panel of peer reviewers would "rigorously" review the data (without a site visit) at various intervals -- how much more frequently than the current 10-year accreditation review would probably depend on the perceived health of the college -- and make a recommendation on whether to approve the institution for re-accreditation.
  • "The portfolio portion really should be what's tied to continued accreditation," said one member of the audience. "As soon as you tie the pathway portion into that, you make it a very different exercise, as we're going to want to make a good case, to make ourselves look good."
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News: Scrutiny for an Accreditor - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The inspector general essentially accused the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools of shirking its federal gate keeping duties because it granted accreditation to a for-profit university despite a single flaw that the inspector general deemed to be serious.
  • The agency's action stunned many higher education leaders, who characterized it as a misstep of dramatic proportions. "We believe that the OIG's recommendation is an unwarranted overreaction," Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, said in a news release. "To make a sweeping indictment of the HLC's capacity to judge quality based on a single case or even a small group of cases is wrongheaded and overreaching."
  • Added Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and head of the Council of Regional Accreditation Commissions: "This is certainly of concern, because they appear to have put themselves in the place of the evaluators, and made a recommendation that's fairly radical based on one instance at one institution."
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  • the Obama administration, in the presence of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has shown no signs of backing off. While last winter's negotiations over new rules governing accreditation ended in far more accord than did the 2007 discussion that blew up in conflict, the end result left some accreditation experts believing that the federal government was continuing to expand its reach and authority into accreditation matters.
  • Such action, if taken, could impair the ability of the many hundreds of colleges that the commission accredits to award federal financial aid.
  • Gary Brown on 26 Dec 09
     
    The Department of Education and Middle States at odds, and the new scrutiny is revealed.
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Views: Asking Too Much (and Too Little) of Accreditors - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...neal accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Senators want to know why accreditors haven’t protected the public interest.
  • Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability.
  • But turning accreditors into gatekeepers changed the picture. In effect, accreditors now held a gun to the heads of colleges and universities since federal financial aid wouldn’t flow unless the institution received “accredited” status.
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  • Congress listened to higher education lobbyists and designated accreditors -- teams made up largely of administrators and faculty -- to be “reliable authorities” on educational quality. Intending to protect institutional autonomy, Congress appropriated the existing voluntary system by which institutions differentiated themselves.
  • A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!
  • accreditation is “premised upon collegiality and assistance; rather than requirements that institutions meet certain standards (with public announcements when they don’t."
  • Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that many accredited colleges are adding little educational value. The 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that nearly a third of college graduates were unable to compare two newspaper editorials or compute the cost of office items, prompting the Spellings Commission and others to raise concerns about accreditors’ attention to productivity and quality.
  • But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality.
  • ccreditation is nothing more than an outdated industrial-era monopoly whose regulations prevent colleges from cultivating the skills, flexibility, and innovation that they need to ensure quality and accountability.
  • there is a much cheaper and better way: a self-certifying regimen of financial accountability, coupled with transparency about graduation rates and student success. (See some alternatives here and here.)
  • Such a system would prioritize student and parent assessment over the judgment of institutional peers or the educational bureaucracy. And it would protect students, parents, and taxpayers from fraud or mismanagement by permitting immediate complaints and investigations, with a notarized certification from the institution to serve as Exhibit A
  • The only way to protect the public interest is to end the current system of peer review patronage, and demand that colleges and universities put their reputation -- and their performance -- on the line.
  • Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The views stated herein do not represent the views of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, of which she is a member.
  • Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10
     
    The ascending view of accreditation.
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Education Department Official Calls for More Transparency in Accreditation - Government... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63730 accreditation transparency
shared by Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Martha J. Kanter, the No. 2 official in the U.S. Education Department, took higher-education accrediting organizations to task on Tuesday for being too secretive about how they assess colleges and for using outmoded standards that don't give enough weight to measuring student learning.
  • "Accreditation isn't transparent enough, it just isn't," Ms. Kanter said
  • The organizations that are responsible for assuring quality in higher education must consider whether their processes are really helping institutions improve and whether they are focusing too much on "inputs," such as the amount of time that students spend in class, and too little on what they have learned.
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  • Accreditors and institutions also should be more willing to open up the accrediting process, by making self-studies easily accessible to the public and to other colleges that want to learn best practices, by announcing the teams of peer reviewers that make campus visits for accreditation purposes, and by opening accrediting commission meetings to the public.
  • Making the entire process open could have the unintended consequence of giving an institution a bad reputation even as they are working diligently to correct problems, said Ms. Wheelan.
  • Gary Brown on 26 Jan 10
     
    Their debate is our debate--and challenge
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Has Accreditation Produced an Ethical Business Climate? - Letters to the Editor - The C... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...49058 accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 10 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Institutions that choose to seek program accreditation must, in the finite world of budgets, shift funds away from many struggling departments and toward the chosen few to ensure that all criteria, from faculty credentials and salaries to high-tech classrooms and generous support staff, are not only met but exceeded.
  • Last year's economic crisis, fueled largely by the graduates of elite, accredited M.B.A. programs who flocked into banking and Wall Street, suggests a startling ethical blindness, social irresponsibility, and historical ignorance.
  • What good are accrediting agencies that take no responsibility for the behavior of those they accredit?
  • Gary Brown on 10 Nov 09
     
    We might choose to help our accreditors by forwarding a response to this letter in our Rain King write up.
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For Accreditation, a Narrow Window of Opportunity - Commentary - The Chronicle of Highe... - 4 views

chronicle.com/...65980 accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 24 Jun 10 - Cached
  • After two years as president of the American Council on Education, I feel compelled to send a wake-up call to campus executives: If federal policy makers are now willing to bail out the nation's leading banks and buy equity stakes in auto makers because those companies are "too big to fail," they will probably have few reservations about regulating an education system that they now understand is "too important to fail."
  • Regardless of party, policy makers are clearly aware of the importance of education and are demanding improved performance and more information, from preschool to graduate school. In this environment, we should expect college accreditation to come under significant scrutiny.
  • It has also clearly signaled its interest in using data to measure institutional performance and student outcomes, and it has invested in state efforts to create student-data systems from pre-kindergarten through graduate school.
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  • Higher education has so far navigated its way through the environment of increased regulatory interest without substantial changes to our system of quality assurance or federally mandated outcomes assessment. But that has only bought us time. As we look ahead, we must keep three facts in mind: Interest in accountability is bipartisan, and the pendulum has swung toward more regulation in virtually all sectors. The economic crisis is likely to spur increased calls from policy makers to control college prices and demonstrate that students are getting value for the dollar. The size of the federal budget deficit will force everyone who receives federal support to produce more and better evidence that an investment of federal funds will pay dividends for individuals and society.
  • If we do not seize the opportunity to strengthen voluntary peer accreditation as a rigorous test of institutional quality, grounded in appropriate measures of student learning, we place at risk a precious bulwark against excessive government intervention, a bulwark that has allowed American higher education to flourish. When it comes to safeguarding the quality, diversity, and independence of American higher education, accreditors hold the keys to the kingdom.
  • all accreditors now require colleges and universities to put more emphasis on measuring student-learning outcomes. They should be equally vigilant about ensuring that those data are used to achieve improvements in outcomes
  • share plain-language results of accreditation reviews with the public.
  • It takes very little close reading to see through the self-serving statements here: namely that higher education institutions must do a better PR job pretending they are interested in meaningful reform so as to head off any real reform that migh come from the federal authorities.
  • THEREFORE, let me voice a wakeup call for those who are really interested in reform--not that there are many.1.There will never be any meaningful reform unless we have a centralized and nationalized higher educational system. Leaving higher education in the hands of individual institutions is no longer effective and is in fact what has led to the present state we find ourselves in. Year after countless year we have been promised changes in higher education and year after year nothing changes. IF CHANGE IS TO COME IT MUST BE FORCED ONTO HIGHER EDUCATION FROM THE OUTSIDE.
  • Higher education in America can no longer afford to be organized around the useless market capitalism that forces too many financially marginalized institutions to compete for less and less.
  • Keeping Quiet by Pablo NerudaIf we were not so singled-mindedabout keeping our lives moving,and for once could do nothing,perhaps a huge silencemight interrupt this sadnessof never understanding ourselvesand of threatening ourselves with death.
  • Gary Brown on 24 Jun 10
     
    It is heating up again
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Under Obama, Accreditation Is Still in the Hot Seat - Government - The Chronicle of Hig... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124361 accountability market
shared by Gary Brown on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • George Miller, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House education committee, said defining a credit hour is critical to ensure that students and taxpayers, through federal student aid, are not footing the bill for courses that are not worth the amount of credit being awarded.
    • Gary Brown
      Gary Brown on 13 Sep 10
       
      "Worth" opens up some interesting implications.  Intended I suspect, to dampen courses like basket-weaving, the production of outcomes cannot be far off, the production of economic impact related to those outcomes a step or less behind. 
  • Senators also questioned the independence of accreditors, which are supported by dues from member institutions and governed by representatives of the colleges they accredit.
  • Sen. Michael B. Enzi, the top Republican on the Senate Education Committee, has said he wants Congress to look beyond just problems in the for-profit sector. He said at a hearing last month that he would be "working to lay the groundwork for a broader, thorough, and more fair investigation into higher education" that would ask whether taxpayers are getting an appropriate value for the money they spend on all colleges.
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  • State and federal governments are better equipped to enforce consumer protections for students, say accreditors, who have traditionally focused on preserving academic quality.
  • Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which represents about 3,000 colleges, said that over the past several years accrediting organizations have responded to the growing calls for accountability and transparency from the public and lawmakers. The groups, she said, have worked to better identify and judge student achievement and share more information about what they do and how well the institutions are performing.
  • Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said the debate boils down to whether accreditors should serve primarily as consumer protectors or continue their traditional role of monitoring academic quality more broadly.
  • Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability & Productivity and a member of the Spellings Commission
  • "We should be moving to more of a Consumer Reports for colleges, to provide the public with information that the college rankings do imperfectly," he said.
  • accreditation will have to evolve to meet not only government's expectations but also the changing college
  • market
  • Nearly two years into the Obama Administration, colleges have not gotten the relief they expected from the contentious battles over measuring quality that defined the Bush Education Department.
  • Bracing for the prospect of new rules and laws that could expand their responsibilities, accreditors and the institutions they monitor are defending the self-regulation colleges use to ensure academic quality. But they are also responding to the pressures from the White House and Capitol Hill by making some changes on their own, hoping to stanch the possibility of more far-reaching federal requirements.
  • Advocates of change say the six regional and seven national accreditors have varying standards that are sometimes too lax, allowing for limited oversight of how credits are awarded, how much learning is accomplished, and what happens to the mission of institutions that change owners.
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Schmidt - 3 views

www.irrodl.org/...641 accreditation peer review Open education assessment
shared by Gary Brown on 08 Nov 09 - Cached
  • There are a number of assessment methods by which learning can be evaluated (exam, practicum, etc.) for the purpose of recognition and accreditation, and there are a number of different purposes for the accreditation itself (i.e., job, social recognition, membership in a group, etc). As our world moves from an industrial to a knowledge society, new skills are needed. Social web technologies offer opportunities for learning, which build these skills and allow new ways to assess them.
  • This paper makes the case for a peer-based method of assessment and recognition as a feasible option for accreditation purposes. The peer-based method would leverage online communities and tools, for example digital portfolios, digital trails, and aggregations of individual opinions and ratings into a reliable assessment of quality. Recognition by peers can have a similar function as formal accreditation, and pathways to turn peer recognition into formal credits are outlined. The authors conclude by presenting an open education assessment and accreditation scenario, which draws upon the attributes of open source software communities: trust, relevance, scalability, and transparency.
  • Gary Brown on 08 Nov 09
     
    Kinship here, and familiar friends.
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For-Profit Hearing: Legislation Might Include All Colleges & Greed is Good « ... - 2 views

wcetblog.wordpress.com/...forprofithearingoct2010 accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Democrats were being unfair in singling out the for-profit institutions.  Senator Enzi, the ranking minority member on the Committee, followed up with a statement released on the HELP webpage.  Enzi said. “It is naïve to think that these problems are limited to just the for-profit sector.”
  • Senator Jeff Merkley (OR) asked if “student loans should be extended to programs that are not accredited.”  Ms. Asher gave a polite lesson on the difference between accrediting institution and accrediting program.
  • Finances in higher education is confusing and accreditation is confusing
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  • Ms. Asher was also a champion of reviewing the financial incentives for colleges.  “We need to shift incentives for colleges to focus on outcomes for students.”
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News: No Letup From Washington - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...hlc accountability accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Virtually all of the national higher education leaders who spoke to the country's largest accrediting group sent a version of the same message: The federal government is dead serious about holding colleges and universities accountable for their performance, and can be counted on to impose undesirable requirements if higher education officials don't make meaningful changes themselves.
  • "This is meant to be a wakeup call," Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said in Monday's keynote address
  • I believe it’s wise for us to assume they will have little reservation about regulating higher education now that they know it is too important to fail."
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  • Obama administration will be tough on colleges because its officials value higher education and believe it needs to perform much better, and successfully educate many more students, to drive the American economy.
  • In her own speech to the Higher Learning Commission’s members on Sunday, Sylvia Manning, the group’s president, cited several signs that the new administration seemed willing to delve into territory that not long ago would have been viewed as off-limits to federal intrusion. Among them: A recently published “draft” of a guide to accreditation that many accrediting officials believe is overly prescriptive. A just-completed round of negotiations over proposed rules that deal with the definition of a “credit hour” and other issues that touch on academic quality -- areas that have historically been the province of colleges and their faculties. And, of special relevance for the Higher Learning Commission, a trio of critical letters from the Education Department’s inspector general challenging the association’s policies and those of two other regional accreditors on key matters -- and in North Central’s case, questioning its continued viability. With that stroke, Manning noted, the department’s newfound activism “has come to the doorstep, or into the living room, of HLC.”
  • Pressure to measure student learning -- to find out which tactics and approaches are effective, which create efficiency without lowering results -- is increasingly coming from what Broad called the Obama administration's "kitchen cabinet," foundations like the Lumina Foundation for Education (which she singled out) to which the White House and Education Department are increasingly looking for education policy help.
  • She cited an October speech in which the foundation's president, Jamie P. Merisotis, said that student learning should be recognized as the "primary measure of quality in higher education," and heralded the European Union's Bologna process as a potential path for making that so
  • we cannot lay low and hope that the glare of the spotlight will eventually fall on others," Broad told the Higher Learning Commission audience.
  • While higher ed groups have been warned repeatedly that they must act before Congress next renews the Higher Education Act -- a process that will begin in earnest in two or three years -- the reality is that politicians in Washington no longer feel obliged to hold off on major changes to higher education policy until that main law is reviewed. Congress has passed "seven major pieces of legislation" related to higher education in recent years, and "I wish I could tell you that the window is open" until the next reauthorization, Broad said. "But we cannot presume that we have the luxury of years within which to get our collective house in order. We must act quickly."
  • But where will such large-scale change come from? The regional accreditors acting together to align their standards? Groups of colleges working together to agree on a common set of learning outcomes for general education, building on the work of the American Association of Colleges and Universities? No answers here, yet.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Apr 10
     
    Note the positions of the participants
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WSU Today Online - Current Article List - 1 views

www.wsutoday.wsu.edu/...Publications.asp accreditation NCATE
shared by Gary Brown on 19 Nov 09 - Cached
  • National and state agencies have renewed accreditation for WSU's College of Education, which earned praise as “a standout institution.” The ratings came after voluntary reviews by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and Washington State’s Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB). Both accreditation teams, which work cooperatively, visited WSU last spring.
  • accredited institutions must: * Carefully assess this knowledge and skill to determine that candidates may graduate. * Have partnerships with schools that enable candidates to develop the skills necessary to help students learn. * Prepare candidates to understand and work with diverse student populations. * Have faculty who model effective teaching practices. * Have the resources, including information technology resources, necessary to prepare candidates to meet new standards.
  • Gary Brown on 19 Nov 09
     
    Note the criteria as it pertains to NWCC&U
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At Colleges, Assessment Satisfies Only Accreditors - Letters to the Editor - The Chroni... - 2 views

chronicle.com/...49236 accreditation assessment faculty development
shared by Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Some of that is due to the influence of the traditional academic freedom that faculty members have enjoyed. Some of it is ego. And some of it is lack of understanding of how it can work. There is also a huge disconnect between satisfying outside parties, like accreditors and the government, and using assessment as a quality-improvement system.
  • We are driven by regional accreditation and program-level accreditation, not by quality improvement. At our institution, we talk about assessment a lot, and do just enough to satisfy the requirements of our outside reviewers.
  • Standardized direct measures, like the Major Field Test for M.B.A. graduates?
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  • The problem with the test is that it does not directly align with our program's learning outcomes and it does not yield useful information for closing the loop. So why do we use it? Because it is accepted by accreditors as a direct measure and it is less expensive and time-consuming than more useful tools.
  • Without exception, the most useful information for improving the program and student learning comes from the anecdotal and indirect information.
  • We don't have the time and the resources to do what we really want to do to continuously improve the quality of our programs and instruction. We don't have a culture of continuous improvement. We don't make changes on a regular basis, because we are trapped by the catalog publishing cycle, accreditation visits, and the entrenched misunderstanding of the purposes of assessment.
  • The institutions that use it are ones that have adequate resources to do so. The time necessary for training, whole-system involvement, and developing the programs for improvement is daunting. And it is only being used by one regional accrediting body, as far as I know.
  • Until higher education as a whole is willing to look at changing its approach to assessment, I don't think it will happen
  • Gary Brown on 24 Nov 09
     
    The challenge and another piece of evidence that the nuances of assessment as it related to teaching and learning remain elusive.
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Quick Takes: May 13, 2010 - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

www.insidehighered.com/...qt accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • A proposed change in the Council for Higher Education Accreditation's policies for recognizing accrediting agencies is drawing criticism from the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Under the proposed change, which is part of a larger revision of the council's procedures for reviewing the work of accreditors, would require agencies to show that they "inform the public of decisions on [individual colleges' or programs'] accreditation status and the reasons for these decisions."
  • CHEA language is ambiguous about the purpose of the new requirement." CHEA is seeking comment on the new standards.
  • Gary Brown on 07 Jun 10
     
    changing pressures influencing changes in accreditation, and a link to weigh in....
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Accreditation Council Sets Stricter Standards for Recognizing Accreditors - Government ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...124638 accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • As Congress and the Education Department turn up the heat on accrediting agencies to be more stringent in monitoring colleges and universities,. a nongovernmental group is also raising its requirements for recognizing accreditors.
  • requiring accreditors to disclose the specific reasons for denying or withdrawing their approval of a college.
  • Gary Brown on 28 Sep 10
     
    I guess just saying because we say so no longer suffices.
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Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over Quality Standards - Wired Campus - The Chro... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27586 quality accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the group called for a more uniform accreditation standard across state lines as well as a formal framework for getting a conversation on regulation started.
  • College officials claim that what states really mean when they discuss quality in online education is the credibility of online education in general. John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College, said “there is a bit of a double standard” when it comes to regulating online institutions; states, he feels, apply stricter standards to the online world.
  • Gary Brown on 13 Oct 10
     
    I note the underlying issue of "credibility" as the core of accreditation. It raises the question, again:  Why would standardized tests be presumed, as Excelsior does, to be a better indicator than a model of stakeholder endorsement?
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Disaggregate power not people - Part two: now with more manifesto @ Dave's Educational ... - 2 views

davecormier.com/...rt-two-now-with-more-manifesto cormier Personal learning environments social networking
shared by Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 12 Oct 10
     
    "Definition 2 - disaggregating power There is a very different power relationship between being given a space which 'enables contexts' and 'allows supports' for a user and a space that you build and support for yourself. It dodges those institutionally created problems of student mobility, of losing the connections formed in your learning and gives you a professional 'place' from which you can start to make long term knowledge network connections that form the higher end of the productive learning/knowing that is possible on the web. The power is disaggregated in the sense that while attending an institution of learning you are still under the dominance of the instructor or the regulations surrounding accreditation, but coming to your learning space is not about that dominance. The power held (and, i should probably add, that you've given to that institution in applying for accreditation/learning it's not (necessarily) a power of tyranny) by the institution only touches some of your work, and it need not impede any work you choose to do. Here's where I get to the part about the 'personal' that's been bothering me The danger in taking definition two as our definition for PLE is that we lose sight of the subtle, complex dance of person and ecology so eloquently described by Keith Hamon in his response to my post. Maybe more dangerously, we might get taken up as thinking that learning is something that happens to the person, and not as part of a complex rhizome of connections that form the basis of the human experience. Learning (and I don't mean definitions or background) and the making of connections of knowledge is something that is steeped in complexity. At each point we are structured in the work (written in a book, sung in a song, spoken in a web session) of others that constantly tests our own connections and further complexifies our understanding. This is the pattern of knowledge as i understand it. It is organic, and messy, and su
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Accrediting Agencies Confront New Challenges - Letters to the Editor - The Chronicle of... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63530 accreditation
shared by Gary Brown on 19 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The Chronicle, December 17). In an era of global expansion in higher education, accreditation agencies are increasingly confronted with myriad challenges surrounding various forms of distance education (whether virtual, so-called branch campuses, or study abroad) and cross-institutional certification.
  • the American Academy for Liberal Education is particularly well placed to view this changing pedagogical and institutional landscape, both domestically and worldwide.
  • AALE goes several steps further in evaluating whether institutions meet an extensive set of pedagogical standards specifically related to liberal education—standards of effective reasoning, for instance, and broad and deep learning. This level of assessment requires extensive classroom visitations, conversations with students and faculty members, and the time to assess the climate of learning at every institution we visit.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Innovation and quality in higher education can only join hands when institutions aspire—and are held to—independent, third-party standards of assessment.
  • Gary Brown on 19 Jan 10
     
    a small but clear stress made for independent review
12More

Accreditation and assessment in an Open Course - an opening proposal | Open Course in E... - 1 views

edfutures.com/...t-open-course-opening-proposal
shared by Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • A good example of this may be a learning portfolio created by a students and reviewed by an instructor. The instructor might be looking for higher orders of learning... evidence of creative thinking, of the development of complex concepts or looking for things like improvement.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10
       
      He starts with a portfolio reviewed by the instructor, but it gets better
  • There is a simple sense in which assessing people for this course involves tracking their willingness to participate in the discussion. I have claimed in many contexts that in fields in which the canon is difficult to identify, where what is 'true' is not possible to identify knowledge becomes a negotiation. This will certainly true in this course, so I think the most important part of the assessment will be whether the learner in question has collaborated, has participated has ENGAGED with the material and with other participants of the course.
  • What we need, then, is a peer review model for assessment. We need people to take it as their responsibility to review the work of others, to confirm their engagement, and form community/networks of assessment that monitor and help each other.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • (say... 3-5 other participants are willing to sign off on your participation)
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10
       
      peer credentialling.
  • Evidence of contribution on course projects
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10
       
      I would prefer he say "projects" where the learner has latitude to define the project, rather than a 'course project' where the agency seems to be outside the learner. See our diagram of last April, the learner should be working their problem in their community
  • I think for those that are looking for PD credit we should be able to use the proposed assessment model (once you guys make it better) for accreditation. You would end up with an email that said "i was assessed based on this model and was not found wanting" signed by facilitators (or other participants, as surely given the quality of the participants i've seen, they would qualify as people who could guarantee such a thing).
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10
       
      Peer accreditation. It depends on the credibility of those signing off see also http://www.nilspeterson.com/2010/03/21/reimagining-both-learning-learning-institutions/
  • I think the Otago model would work well here. I call it the Otago model as Leigh Blackall's course at Otago was the first time i actually heard of someone doing it. In this model you do all the work in a given course, and then are assessed for credit AFTER the course by, essentially, challenging for PLAR. It's a nice distributed model, as it allows different people to get different credit for the same course.
    • Nils Peterson
      Nils Peterson on 20 Apr 10
       
      Challenging for a particular credit in an established institutional system, or making the claim that you have a useful solution to a problem and the solution merits "credit" in a particular system's procedures.
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