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.
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Accrediting Agencies Confront New Challenges - Letters to the Editor - The Chronicle of... - 0 views
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the American Academy for Liberal Education is particularly well placed to view this changing pedagogical and institutional landscape, both domestically and worldwide.
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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.
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Innovation and quality in higher education can only join hands when institutions aspire—and are held to—independent, third-party standards of assessment.
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Quick Takes: May 13, 2010 - Inside Higher Ed - 2 views
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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."
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CHEA language is ambiguous about the purpose of the new requirement." CHEA is seeking comment on the new standards.
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Movie Clips and Copyright - 0 views
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Video clips -- sometimes the copyright question comes up, so this green light is good news. Video clips may lend themselves to scenario-based assessments -- instead of reading a long article, students could look at a digitally presented case to analyze and critique -- might open up a lot of possibilities for assessment activities. a latest round of rule changes, issued Monday by the U.S. Copyright Office, dealing with what is legal and what is not as far as decrypting and repurposing copyrighted content. One change in particular is making waves in academe: an exemption that allows professors in all fields and "film and media studies students" to hack encrypted DVD content and clip "short portions" into documentary films and "non-commercial videos." (The agency does not define "short portions.") This means that any professors can legally extract movie clips and incorporate them into lectures, as long as they are willing to decrypt them - a task made relatively easy by widely available programs known as "DVD rippers." The exemption also permits professors to use ripped content in non-classroom settings that are similarly protected under "fair use" - such as presentations at academic conferences.
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2009 Annual Meeting | Conference Program - 0 views
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This session explores the notion that assessment for transformational learning is best utilized as a learning tool. By providing timely, transparent, and appropriate feedback, both to students and to the institution itself, learning is enhanced – a far different motive for assessment than is external accountability.
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Academic and corporate communities agree on the urgent need for contemporary, research-based pedagogies of engagement in STEM fields. Participants will learn how leaders from academic departments and institutions have collaborated with leaders from the corporate and business community in regional networks to ensure that graduates meet the expectations of prospective employers and the public.
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Professor Pan will discuss the reflective teaching methods used to prepare students to recognize and mobilize community assets as they design, implement, and evaluate projects to improve public health.
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Students tasked to learn about a community, ride the bus, make a Doc appt. Then tasked to do a non-clinical health project in that community (they do plenty of clinical stuff elsewhere in the program). Project must build capacity in the community to survive after the student leaves. Example. Work with hispanic parents in Sacramento about parenting issue, ex getting kids to sleep on time. Student had identified problem in the community, but first project idea was show a video, which was not capacity building. Rather than showing the video, used the video as a template and made a new video. Families were actors. Result was spanish DVD that the community could own. Pan thinks this is increased capacity in the community.
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Freshman Survey annually examines the academic habits of mind of entering first-year students. Along with academic involvement, the survey examines diversity, civic engagement, college admissions and expectations of college.
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The project aims to promote faculty and student assessment of undergraduate research products in relation to outcomes associated with basic research skills and general undergraduate learning principles (communication and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, and integration and application of knowledge).
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They focus educators on the magnitude of the challenge to prepare an ever-increasingly diverse, globally-connected student body with the knowledge, ability, processes, and confidence to adapt to diverse environments and respond creatively to the enormous issues facing humankind.
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One challenge of civic engagement in the co-curriculum is the merging of cost and outcome: creating meaningful experiences for students and the community with small staffs, on small budgets, while still having significant, purposeful impact.
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a)claims that faculty are the sole arbiters of what constitutes a liberal education and b) counter claims that student life professionals also possess the knowledge and expertise critical to defining students’ total learning experiences.
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This session introduces a three-year national effort to document how colleges and universities are using assessment data to improve teaching and learning and to facilitate the dissemination and adoption of best practices in the assessment of college learning outcomes.
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Exciting pedagogies of engagement abound, including undergraduate research, community-engaged learning, interdisciplinary exploration, and international study. However, such experiences are typically optional and non-credit-bearing for students, and/or “on top of” the workload for faculty. This session explores strategies for integrating engaged learning into the institutional fabric (curriculum, student role, faculty role) and increasing access to these transformative experiences.
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hands-on experiential learning, especially in collaboration with other students, is a superior pedagogy but how can this be provided in increasingly larger introductory classes?
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As educators seek innovative ways to manage knowledge and expand interdisciplinary attention to pressing global issues, as students and parents look for assurances that their tuition investment will pay professional dividends, and as alumni look for meaningful ways to give back to the institutions that nurtured and prepared them, colleges and universities can integrate these disparate goals through the Guilds, intergenerational membership networks that draw strength from the contributions of all of their members.
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Civic engagement learning derives its power from the engagement of students with real communities—local, national, and global. This panel explores the relationship between student learning and the contexts in which that learning unfolds by examining programs that place students in diverse contexts close to campus and far afield.
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For institutional assessment to make a difference for student learning its results must result in changes in classroom practice. This session explores ways in which the institutional assessment of student learning, such as the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, can be connected to our classrooms.
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To address pressing needs of their communities, government and non-profit agencies are requesting higher education to provide education in an array of human and social services. To serve these needs effectively, higher educationneeds to broaden and deepen its consultation with practitioners in designing new curricula. Colleges and universities would do well to consider a curriculum development model that requires consultation not only with potential employers, but also with practitioners and supervisors of practitioners.
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If transformational liberal education requires engaging the whole student across the educational experience, how can colleges and universities renew strategy and allocate resources effectively to support it? How can assessment be used to improve student learning and strengthen a transformational learning environment?
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Purpose of university is not to grant degrees, it has something to do with learning. Keeling's perspective is that the learning should be transformative; changing perspective. Liberating and emancipatory Learning is a complex interaction among student and others, new knowledge and experience, event, own aspirations. learners construct meaning from these elements. "we change our minds" altering the brain at the micro-level Brain imaging research demonstrates that analogical learning (abstract) demands more from more areas of the brain than semantic (concrete) learning. Mind is not an abstraction, it is based in the brain, a working physical organ .Learner and the environment matter to the learning. Seeds magazine, current issue on brain imaging and learning. Segway from brain research to need for university to educate the whole student. Uses the term 'transformative learning' meaning to transform the learning (re-wire the brain) but does not use transformative assessment (see wikipedia).
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But as public debates roil, higher education has been more reactive than proactive on the question of how best to ensure that today’s students are fully prepared for a fast-paced future.
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Bologna process being adopted (slowly) in EU, the idea is to make academic degrees more interchangeable and understandable across the EU three elements * Qualification Frameworks (transnational, national, disciplinary). Frameworks are graduated, with increasing expertise and autonomy required for the upper levels. They sound like broad skills that we might recognize in the WSU CITR. Not clear how they are assessed * Tuning (benchmarking) process * Diploma Supplements (licensure, thesis, other capstone activities) these extend the information in the transcript. US equivalent might be the Kuali Students system for extending the transcript. Emerging dialog on American capability This dialog is coming from 2 directions * on campus * employers Connect to the Greater Exceptions (2000-2005) iniative. Concluded that American HE has islands of innovation. Lead to LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) Initiative (2005-2015). The dialog is converging because of several forces * Changes in the balance of economic and political power. "The rise of the rest (of the world)" * Global economy in which innovation is key to growth and prosperity LEAP attempts to frame the dialog (look for LEAP in AACU website). Miami-Dade CC has announced a LEAP-derived covenant, the goals must span all aspects of their programs. Define liberal education Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world intellectual and practical skills responsibility integrative skills Marker of success is (here is where the Transformative Gradebook fits in): evidence that students can apply the essential learning outcomes to complex, unscripted problems and real-world settings Current failure -- have not tracked our progress, or have found that we are not doing well. See AACU employer survey 5-10% percent of current graduates taking courses that would meet the global competencies (transcript analysis) See NSSE on Personal and social responsibility gains, less tha
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Dr. Pan will also talk about strategies for breaking down cultural barriers.
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Program on Networked Governance - John F. Kennedy School of Government - 0 views
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"The traditional notion of hierarchical, top down, government has always been an imperfect match for the decentralized governance system of the US. However, much of what government does requires co-production of policy among agencies that have no formal authority over each other, fundamentally undermining the traditional Weberian image of bureaucracy. Networked governance refers to a growing body of research on the interconnectedness of essentially sovereign units, which examines how those interconnections facilitate or inhibit the functioning of the overall system. The objective of this program is two-fold: (1) to foster research on networked governance and (2) to provide a forum to discuss the challenges of networked governance."
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Would You Like Credit With That Internship? - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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Students pay tuition to work for free ... unpaid internships are growing in this down economy, favoring the wealthy who can afford them. But internships are generally valuable for students, administrators say. The complementary courses involve journals, essays, oral presentations, or work portfolios. Independent studies lean toward academics. Companies often see academic credit as substitute compensation that qualifies interns as legally unpaid trainees and keeps them on their colleges' liability insurance. Advertisements specify: "Candidates must be able to receive academic credit." That makes some campus officials bristle. "What they're saying is holding the institution hostage," says Kathy L. Sims, director of career services at the University of California at Los Angeles. Employers don't know colleges' academic standards, she says. "It's really not their call whether their experience is creditworthy." Colleges have dealt with that quandary in various ways. Some, especially those with traditions of experiential learning, vet and monitor internships, enrolling students in courses designed to complement their real-world work. Others let professors sponsor independent studies based on internships. More and more have devised some form of noncredit recognition to try to satisfy employers without altering academic philosophies or making students pay tuition to work free. At Bates College, the game is up. "We're quite adamant about our refusal to play along," says James W. Hughes, a professor of economics. As chairman of the department eight years ago, he got dozens of calls from students, parents, and employers asking for credit for unpaid internships, mainly in the financial industry. "Why is it that we have to evaluate this experience," he says, "just so some multibillion-dollar bank can avoid paying $7.50 an hour?" But the law is vague, and arguably antiquated. In the for-profit sector, guidelines for legally unpaid internships come from a 1947 U
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New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education - Govern... - 1 views
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Congress plans to put for-profit colleges under the microscope on Thursday, asking whether a higher-education model that consumes more than double its proportionate share of federal student aid is an innovation worthy of duplication or a recipe for long-term economic disaster.
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The evaluation threatens new headaches for an industry that is sometimes exalted by government policy makers as a lean results-oriented example for the rest of academe, and other times caricatured as an opportunistic outlier that peddles low-value education to unprepared high school dropouts.
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Economic bubbles such as the unsustainable surge in housing prices "typically are built on ignorance and borrowed money," says one prominent pessimist on the matter, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "And the reason you've got a higher-education bubble is ignorance and borrowed money," Mr. Reynolds said.
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Congress and colleges still lack a firm sense of "what our higher education system is producing," said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
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Mr. Reynolds said. Colleges of all type have been raising tuition for years as the government offers ever-growing amounts of grant aid and loan money, he said. The price inflation is driven by the fact that a government-backed loan, while offering students only a slight break from market interest rates, "looks cheap because you don't have to make payments for a while,"
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That determination to expand the distribution of federal tuition assistance has left Congress and the White House seeking other ways to ensure that students get quality for their money. Just last week, the House education committee held a hearing in which Democratic members joined the Education Department's inspector general in pressing accrediting agencies to more clearly define the "credit hour" measurement used in student-aid allocations. Some colleges have objected, wanting more flexibility in defining their educational missions.
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Whether it involves defining credit hours or setting accreditation standards, the root of the problem may be that the government is looking for better ways to ensure that its money is spent on worthwhile educational ventures, and yet it doesn't want to challenge the right of each college to define its own mission. So far that has proven to be a fundamental contradiction in judging the overall value of higher education, said Mr. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation. "There's got to be a third way," he said. "We don't have it yet."
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Education ambivalence : Nature : Nature Publishing Group - 1 views
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Nature Education, last year conducted a survey of 450 university-level science faculty members from more than 30 countries. The first report from that survey, freely available at http://go.nature.com/5wEKij, focuses on 'postsecondary' university- and college-level education. It finds that more than half of the respondents in Europe, Asia and North America feel that the quality of undergraduate science education in their country is mediocre, poor or very poor.
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77% of respondents indicated that they considered their teaching responsibilities to be just as important as their research — and 16% said teaching was more important.
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But the biggest barrier to improvement is the pervasive perception that academic institutions — and the prevailing rewards structure of science — value research far more than teaching
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despite their beliefs that teaching was at least as important as research, many respondents said that they would choose to appoint a researcher rather than a teacher to an open tenured position.
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To correct this misalignment of values, two things are required. The first is to establish a standardized system of teaching evaluation. This would give universities and professors alike the feedback they need to improve.
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But by showering so many rewards on research instead of on teaching, universities and funding agencies risk undermining the educational quality that is required for research to flourish in the long term.
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Lawmakers Focus Ire on Accreditors for Abuses at For-Profit Colleges - Government - The... - 1 views
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Six weeks after vowing to cull the bad apples from the for-profit higher-education sector, some Senate Democrats are asking whether the whole barrel is spoiled, and largely blaming accreditors for the rot.
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Pressed by lawmakers, Mr. Kutz faulted the Education Department, saying it has failed in its oversight of the sector.
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Senate Democrats focused most of their ire on accreditors, grilling the head of one national agency about the standards it uses to judge institutions.
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"Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren't rigorous enough?" asked Senator Franken, of Minnesota.
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"But your on-site evaluations didn't detect it," Senator Harkin said. "It seems like you accept the schools' word on what they're doing."
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Mr. Harkin said he planned to "look into" the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it "seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict."
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That should please committee Republicans, who called for a broader investigation into higher education. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the top Republican on the education panel, said he would ask the GAO to expand its investigation to nonprofit colleges as well.
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Let's Make Rankings That Matter - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 3 views
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By outsourcing evaluation of our doctoral programs to an external agency, we allow ourselves to play the double game of insulating ourselves from the criticisms they may raise by questioning their accuracy, while embracing the praise they bestow.
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The solution to the problem is obvious: Universities should provide relevant information to potential students and faculty members themselves, instead of relying on an outside body to do it for them, years too late. How? By carrying out yearly audits of their doctoral programs.
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The ubiquitous rise of social networking and open access to information via electronic media facilitate this approach to self-evaluation of academic departments. There is no need to depend on an obsolete system that irregularly publishes rankings when all of the necessary tools—e-mail, databases, Web sites—are available at all institutions of higher learning.
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A great paradox of modern academe is that our institutions take pride in being on the cutting edge of new ideas and innovations, yet remain resistant and even hostile to the openness made possible by technology
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We should not hide our departments' deficiencies in debatable rankings, but rather be honest about those limitations in order to aggressively pursue solutions that will strengthen doctoral programs and the institutions in which they play a vital role.
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Accreditation Council Sets Stricter Standards for Recognizing Accreditors - Government ... - 1 views
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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.
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requiring accreditors to disclose the specific reasons for denying or withdrawing their approval of a college.
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Online Colleges and States Are at Odds Over Quality Standards - Wired Campus - The Chro... - 2 views
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But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in providing students with high-quality education.
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“We’re very interested in making sure that as many good opportunities are available to students as possible,” added David Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission.
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he group called for a more uniform accreditation standard across state lines as well as a formal framework for getting a conversation on regulation started. Even with the framework in place, however, the state representatives said it will be difficult to get state-education agencies and state legislatures to agree. “Trying to bring 50 different people together is really tough,” Mr. Longanecker said.
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Like state regulators, colleges are also facing hard decisions on quality standards. With such a diversity in online institutions, Ms. Eaton said it will be difficult to impose a uniform set of standards. “If we were in agreement about quality,” she said, “somebody’s freedom would be compromised.”
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American Colleges Lag in Meeting Labor Needs - Research - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views
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In general, growth in employment opportunities and wages and demand for specific occupations do increase degree completion. But that relationship operates with a lag, with the strongest correlations occurring with a delay of four to seven years—the time it takes to earn an undergraduate or advanced degree
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As a result, employers must look elsewhere to fill jobs, such as hiring skilled workers from abroad.
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If American businesses do not want to rely on foreign workers in particular fields, the authors note, they will need to consider strategies to expand the production of domestic degrees in key areas,
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The study also does not wholly account for the role job switching plays in meeting work-force needs.
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The recent adminstrative challenge to our acrediting agencies is one of many examples of not only a call for greater accountability but a public expectation of educations promise for a better life continuing to deliver
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Accreditation and assessment in an Open Course - an opening proposal | Open Course in E... - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(say... 3-5 other participants are willing to sign off on your participation)
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Evidence of contribution on course projects
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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).
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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/
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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.
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How to make curriculum mapping useful to university academics « The Weblog of... - 5 views
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Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate - 0 views
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September 2, 2009 Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate By: Maryellen Weimer in Effective Classroom Management SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Assumptions about Setting the Right Classroom Climate", url: "http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-classroom-management/assumptions-about-setting-the-right-classroom-climate/" });ShareThis For quite some time now I’ve been interested in a widely held set of assumptions faculty make about the need to assert control at the beginning of a course. The argument goes something like this: When a course starts, the teacher needs to set the rules and clearly establish who’s in charge. If the course goes well, meaning students abide by the rules and do not challenge the teacher’s authority, then the teacher can gradually ease up and be a bit looser about the rules.
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If all potential challenges to authority are headed off at the pass, then the teacher can devote full attention to the content, and isn’t that where the teacher’s expertise really shines? And so the classroom becomes a place that showcases teaching more than learning? My suspicion is that most teachers overreact to potential threats.
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Google for Government? Broad Representations of Large N DataSets | Computational Legal ... - 0 views
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We agree with both President Obama and Senator Coburn that universal accessibility of such information is worthwhile goal. However, we believe this is only a first step. In a deep sense, our prior post is designed to serve as a demonstration project. We are just two graduate students working on a shoestring budget. With the resources of the federal government, however, it would certainly be possible to create a series of simple interfaces designed to broadly represent of large amounts of information. While these interfaces should rely upon the best available analytical methods, such methods could probably be built-in behind the scenes. At a minimum, government agencies should follow the suggestion of David G. Robinson and his co-authors who argue the federal government "should require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large."
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an interesting example of work with large data sets, but also, a research group that is working "off-shore" from their campus and in a blog in ways that seem to parallel WSUCTLT
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Has Accreditation Produced an Ethical Business Climate? - Letters to the Editor - The C... - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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What good are accrediting agencies that take no responsibility for the behavior of those they accredit?