Group items tagged

give state regulators a new option to either act as accreditors or create their own accreditation systems.

“States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus.”

regional accreditors are doing a fairly good job. They are under enormous pressure to keep “bad actors” at bay while also encouraging experimentation. And he said accreditors usually get it right.

Andrew Kelly, however, likes Lee’s idea. Kelly, who is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform, said it would create a credible alternative to the existing accreditation system, which the bill would leave intact.

eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority

“Accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing and even competency-based tests,”

broad, bipartisan agreement that federal aid policies have not kept pace with new approaches to higher education.

expansion of competency-based education. And he said the federal rules governing financial aid make it hard for colleges to go big with those programs.

accreditors is that they favor the status quo, in part because they are membership organizations of academics that essentially practice self-regulation.

changes to the existing accreditation system that might make it easier for competency-based and other emerging forms of online education to spread.

offering competency-based degrees through a process called direct assessment, which is completely de-coupled from the credit-hour standard.

These digital activities should not be the sole measure of tenure, but they should be counted in the tenure formula. The irony today is that if the open activity is analog (e.g., participation on a committee), it likely counts toward tenure, but if the open activity is digital (e.g., writing an academic blog), it probably does not.

They will push at (and leak out of) the boundaries of whatever learning management system (or other enterprise systems) the institution wants them to use. This is not because they are uncooperative; it's simply that these enterprise systems tend to be locked down, allowing only employees and students to share within these environments

For me, an interesting side effect of sharing on the open web is that I've learned to be more careful about what I say and write.

Looking for indicators of open digital faculty is easier than coming up with a strict definition. The presence of several of the following characteristics should be taken as an indication of open digital faculty: Writing a public blog or maintaining a public wiki to share academic interests Freely sharing what might otherwise be guarded intellectual property (e.g., textbooks, research-in-progress, computer programs, course materials, artwork) Participating in a learning community in a social networking platform (e.g., Twitter or LinkedIn discussion groups) Participating in a social network that includes students, both current and past (e.g., Facebook) Encouraging students to participate in class-related projects that employ web-based media (e.g., student blogs, group wikis) Creating or participating in open courses Sharing video or audio content created for a course (e.g., podcasts) Sharing information and ideas from conference talks on the web (e.g., recordings, tweets, presentation links)

Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”

authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.

However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,

And so it is oxymoronic — not to mention just plain moronic — to think that the role of the computer should be to get in there and improve a system which exists as a result of the technological limitations of a previous epoch.”