CTLT and Friends

But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible

Hacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education."

They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.

Evaluating the credibility of one person's statements is difficult if not impossible, especially without knowing, for example, each person's background, training, affiliations, education, or experience. However, we feel that a guide to a person's theoretical expertise can be helpful, so we have built theoretical expertise ranking charts for each ProCon.org website to help differentiate the theoretical expertise of the various sources on our sites.

Intellectual property is shared

There are lots of considerations when considering a technology solution to the outcomes assessment process.  The first thing is to be very clear about what a system can and cannot do.  It CANNOT do your program assessment and evaluation for you!  The institution or program must first define the intended outcomes and performance indicators.  Without a doubt, that is the most difficult part of the process.  Once the indicators have been defined you need to be clear about the role of students and faculty in the use of the techology.  Also, who is the technology "owner"--who will maintain it, keep the outcomes/indicators current, generate reports, etc. etc.

Beginning in 2011, the 331 universities that participate in the Voluntary System of Accountability will be expected to publicly report their students' performance on one of three national tests of college-level learning.

But at least one of those three tests—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA—isn't quite ready to be used as a tool of public accountability, a scholar suggested here on Tuesday during the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.

Students' performance on the test was strongly correlated with how long they spent taking it.

To an analyst such as myself, it is rather unfortunate that the words rhyme.

When we analyze data or systems we certainly do want the patterns to reveal themselves – to come loose – to emerge despite the forces that are holding fast breakthrough realizations and insights needed in order to facilitate progress, positive change and growth.

organizations which embrace self-analysis are the most successful organizations. The lesson: You need not break it in order to fix it.

Making that call - defining what data is - is a powerful cultural gesture right now, because as I've argued before data as an idea or a figure is both highly charged and strangely abstract.

In other words data here is not gathered, measured, stored or transmitted - or not that we can see. It just is, and it seems to be inherent in the objects it refers to; Data Baby is "generating" data as easily as breathing.

This vision of material data is also frustrating because it has all the ingredients of a far more interesting idea: data is material, or at least it depends on material substrates, but the relationship between data and matter is just that, a relationship, not an identity. Data depends on stuff; always in it, and moving transmaterially through it, but it is precisely not stuff in itself.

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.