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Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development? UK universities and colleges are under pressure to do "employer engagement" and some are finding it really difficult. This is sometimes due to the university administrative systems not welcoming non-traditional students, and sometimes because we use "university speak" rather than "employer speak". All ideas very welcome. Thanks. Posted 7 hours ago | Reply Privately /* extlib: /js_controls/_dialog.jsp */ LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-closeWindow', 'Close this window' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-or', 'or' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-cancel', 'Cancel' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-submit', 'Submit' ); LI.i18n.register( 'Dialog-error-generic', 'We\'re sorry. Something unexpected happened and your request could not be completed. Please try again.' ); LI.Controls.addControl('control-7', 'Dialog', { name: 'sendMessageDialog', type: 'task-modeless', content: { node: 'send-message-dialog', title: 'Reply Privately' }, extra: { memberId: '19056441', fullName: 'Anita Pickerden', groupId: '2774663', subject: 'RE: Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development?' } });

Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests

First, the university, a public institution of about 40,000 students in Ohio, needed to comply with the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), which requires that state institutions provide data about graduation rates, tuition, student characteristics, and student learning outcomes, among other measures, in the consistent format developed by its two sponsoring organizations, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

And finally, UC was accepted in 2008 as a member of the fifth cohort of the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, a collaborative body with the goal of advancing knowledge about the effect of electronic portfolio use on student learning outcomes.  

April 20, 2010—The World Bank Group said today it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers.

Hans Rosling, Gapminder Foundation co-founder and vigorous advocate of open data at the World Bank, said, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will foster innovation. That is the most important thing.”He said he hoped the move would inspire more tools for visualizing data and set an example for other international institutions.

The new website at data.worldbank.org offers full access to data from 209 countries, with some of the data going back 50 years. Users will be able to download entire datasets for a particular country or indicator, quickly access raw data, click a button to comment on the data, email and share data with social media sites, says Neil Fantom, a senior statistician at the World Bank.

This is certainly not a trivial challenge-particularly for schools. The workplace, where our work has been concentrated, is perhaps the easiest place to design because, despite the inevitable contradictions and conflict, it is rich with inherently authentic practice-with a social periphery that, as Orr's (1990) or Shaiken's (1990) work shows, can even supersede attempts to impoverish understanding. Consequently, people often learn, complex work skills despite didactic practices that are deliberately designed to deskill. Workplace designers (and managers) should be developing technology to honor that learning ability, not to circumvent it.

they should do so in ways that reinforce the behaviors they want to see -- and avoid the kinds of perverse incentives that are so evident in many policies today.

This is especially true, several speakers argued, on the thorniest of higher education accountability questions -- those related to improving student outcomes.

Oh, and one or two people actually talked about how nice it would be if policy makers still envisioned college as a place where people learn about citizenship or just become educated for education's sake.)

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?

What you get from a college, by contrast, varies wildly from department to department, professor to professor, and course to course. The idea implicit in college brands—that every course reflects certain institutional values and standards—is mostly a fraud. In reality, there are both great and terrible courses at the most esteemed and at the most denigrated institutions.

With a grant from the nonprofit Lumina Foundation for Education, physics and history professors from a range of Utah two- and four-year institutions are applying the "tuning" methods developed as part of the sweeping Bologna Process reforms in Europe.

The group also created "employability maps" by surveying employers of recent physics graduates—including General Electric, Simco Electronics, and the Air Force—to find out what knowledge and skills are needed for successful science careers.

The vast majority of structured learning is content-rich and interaction-poor. That’s understandable in the context of a 20th century mindset and how learning professionals have been taught to develop ‘learning’ events. But it simply isn’t appropriate for today’s world.

Dr Ebbinghaus’ experiment revealed we suffer an exponential ‘forgetting curve’ and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice.

The need to become Interactivity Designers. That’s what they need to do.