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learnnovators

Six Obstacles To Building Communities In Organizations - 0 views

learnnovators.com/ding-communities-organizations

communities organizations e-learning learnnovators workplace learning Community Manager

shared by learnnovators on 05 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • learnnovators on 05 Feb 16
     
    The role of a Community Manager is becoming well-established with communities being perceived as platforms that have the potential to reduce the cost of communication, bridge organizational silos, facilitate cross-team conversations thus creating opportunities for innovation, knowledge transfer, expertise location, and more.
  • learnnovators on 05 Feb 16
     
    The role of a Community Manager is becoming well-established with communities being perceived as platforms that have the potential to reduce the cost of communication, bridge organizational silos, facilitate cross-team conversations thus creating opportunities for innovation, knowledge transfer, expertise location, and more.
Sasha Thackaberry

Competency-based online program at Kentucky's community colleges @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...m-kentuckys-community-colleges

online program kentucky community colleges competency-based elearning

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Sometimes potentially “disruptive” approaches to higher education arrive on campuses with little fanfare. And they can become solid additions to traditional colleges rather than an existential threat. Take Kentucky’s two-year college system, which three years ago began an online offering aimed at working adults. The project, dubbed “Learn on Demand,” hits most of the buzzwords du jour, featuring modular courses that lead to stackable credentials, with both self-paced and competency-based elements. All that’s missing is a MOOC.
  • Roughly 1,000 students are enrolled in Learn on Demand at any one time, according to officials at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Many heard about it by word of mouth, and a growing number of the system’s 33,000 online students have been attracted to the convenience of the classes, which can be broken into modules that take as little as three weeks to complete.
  • On-campus students have also begun “plugging their schedules” with the courses, says Jay Box, the system’s chancellor.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “There was still an audience that we were missing, and that was working adults,” Box says. The problem was one of scheduling, because many “could not commit to a traditional semester.”
  • Under Learn on Demand, students can enroll whenever they want. There are no class schedules or assignment deadlines in the self-paced courses. And students can leave without facing problems when they re-enroll. As Box says, with modular courses, students have “exit points along the way.”
  • The program offers full, 15-week courses as well as ones that are broken into three or more “bite sized” pieces. Faculty course developers “determine the most logical competencies or learning outcomes to group together in a module,” Box says. Some of those modules come with a credit hour. Some don’t, and offer fractional credit. But all of them build toward a certificate or associate degree, including ones in business administration, information technology and nursing.
  • Each module is worth a half-credit, and the course is pay-as-you go, like other modular classes. Tuition is a flat $140 per credit. So in the management course, that’s $67.50 per module. With additional fees, such as charges for e-texts, the course’s modules range from $88 to $105, which is fairly standard across the program. So students can expect to drop no more than a c-note per credit.
  • The project also attempts to make remedial education more efficient.
  • The project, however, includes a college readiness course which enables a student to test out of individual modules -- breaking down their remedial requirements into small pieces. “A typical developmental education student who might test into the highest level of developmental math and would normally have to take a 16-week long course to get the credit for the course,” Box said via e-mail, “might only have to be enrolled through Learn on Demand in one three-week module.”
  • Faculty members at Kentucky’s two-year colleges studied the Western Governors model when they were building their new online program, officials said. They also took a long look at the University of Phoenix, mostly to try to duplicate how the for-profit runs its online programs all day, every day, with instructors and student services always on-call. Rio Salado College, an online two-year institution that is part of Arizona's Maricopa Community College System, also served as an example.
  • For example, the University of Wisconsin System and Northern Arizona University this year announced new degree programs with heavy competency elements. And Western Governors, a nonprofit, online institution that offers bachelor's and graduate degrees, keeps expanding.
Julie Golden

Need Your Help!! - 1 views

Please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you. Please know that I will pay your kindness forward to another doctoral student in need and will send...

learning education teaching lms technology elearning online E-Learning community faculty research

started by Julie Golden on 03 Sep 15 no follow-up yet
anonymous

Navigating the CBE Frontier: At the Educational Crossroads | The EvoLLLution - 2 views

evolllution.com/...-at-the-educational-crossroads

CBE Competency-based FutureofEducation

shared by anonymous on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • First, the need for citizens with postsecondary education could not be higher. From the White House to the Lumina Foundation, national calls are for 60 percent of the U.S. population to have a postsecondary degree by the year 2025. Currently, just 41 percent of the population has such a degree. This means we need to increase the number of graduates by about 20 percent, or almost 64 million more U.S. citizens, in the next ten years. Given that about 18 million people in the entire U.S. are seeking any kind of post-secondary education now,and the average graduation rate is less than 50 percent in six years, we simply can’t “get there” for the U.S. population to reach 60 percent with college degrees in ten years if we don’t attract more students and expand the variety of educational models that we offer people.[2]
  • Second, most students seeking higher education, by far, are “non-traditional” “degree completers:” adults 25 years and older, with some college and no degree, working part or full time, often with family.[3] In my state of Wisconsin, recent census data indicate that 21 percent of our state (or over 800,000 adults) fits this description. Contrast that with the fact that Wisconsin only has about 60,000 college students who are “traditional” (18 to 24, attending full time, and living in or around a university).[4]
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Does it really make sense to expect, even implicitly, that a person already engaged in work and family should step out of that life in order to participate in an institution-based learning community? Instead, shouldn’t we be asking how to provide educational experiences that foster collaborative learning, supporting growth and development, to people who are already fully engaged in their lives outside of an educational institution?
  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • Adult learners need multiple opportunities to earn degrees, including educational models that differ greatly from traditional college programs.[9] They need new models that are structured around the entire 12-month calendar, where one can start and stop without penalty, and quickly move forward when mastery over material is demonstrated. We need to make use of new technologies and the latest in the science of learning to allow students to integrate their education into existing lives and careers. In short, to educate the population that is currently not served well by our traditional institutions of higher education, we need new models and methods that allow education to fit the interests, motivations and lives of our adult learners, not ask them to fit their lives into an educational system geared to 18- to 24-year-old full-time students. This is the promise of CBE.
  • The best CBE programs will design competencies that articulate the skills and abilities needed by productive citizens, and evaluate mastery of those competencies through assessments that blend seamlessly into students work and family.
Gina Hall

MoMA Talks - SPECIAL LIVE STREAM EVENT Learning Environments... - 0 views

momatalks.tumblr.com/...am-event-learning-environments

moma learning environments CAMLF

shared by Gina Hall on 07 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gina Hall on 07 Nov 12
     
    The field of education is undergoing a revolution precipitated by not only the rapid growth of technologies that are reshaping access to information and resources, communication, and learning, but by the demands of an evolving global economy that requires collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. "What role should a museum play as a place of learning in the 21st century?" and "What unique value will museums add to the field?"
Jay Collier

Lighthouse Creativity Lab - 0 views

lighthousecreativitylab.org

creativity lab school k12

shared by Jay Collier on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Jay Collier on 15 Jan 14
     
    The Lighthouse Community Charter School Creativity Lab's vision is to give people from all walks of life the opportunity to participate in designing and making. We are building a K-12 program on site both to serve our own students, but also to help others see how design-make can be integrated into an entire school program.
Xavier Moya

Assajos sobre educació oberta I - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Essays

open p2p education lectures papers

shared by Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    1 Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community 2 Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design 3 Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy 4 Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks 5 Richard Barbrook on the 'High-tech Gift Economy' 6 Yochai Benkler on Peer Production 7 James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement 8 Vasilis Kostakis: At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm 9 George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept 10 Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain 11 Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology 12 Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing 13 Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production 14 Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food 15 Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class. 16 Massimo De Angelis on a political strategy to unite commons and political/social movements 17 Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest 18 Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy 19 Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology 20 Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common 21 Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance 22 Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons 23 Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century 24 John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality 25 Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere 26 Vasilis_Kostakis et al. on Peer Production and Desktop Manufacturing 27 Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism 28 Ugo Mattei: The State, the Market, an
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    29 influential papers on Open Education collected by P2P Foundation
Jay Collier

Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st ... - 0 views

www.nmefoundation.org/...NRC-Report-Pre-Publication

correlation softskills 21stcenturyskills

shared by Jay Collier on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Jay Collier on 25 Nov 13
     
    "To achieve their full potential as adults, young people need to develop a range of skills and knowledge that facilitate mastery and application of English, mathematics, and other school subjects. At the same time, business and political leaders are increasingly asking schools to develop skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and self-management-often referred to as "21st century skills."
Sasha Thackaberry

The Future of Higher Education | Higher Ed Beta @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...future-higher-education

future higher higher education education higher ed beta

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as “disruptive innovation” have abated. 
  • No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation.
  • The innovations taking place may not seem to be as dramatic as those that loomed in 2012, but the consequences are likely be even more far-reaching, challenging established business and staffing models.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • Innovation 1:  Learning Analytics
  • Innovation 2:  Microcredentialing
  • Innovation 3:  Competency-Based Education
  • Especially attractive is competency-based education’s prospect of accelerating time to degree, since students can potentially receive credit for skills and knowledge acquired through life experience or alternative forms of education.
  • But with the U.S. Department of Education and accreditors increasingly willing to allow institutions to experiment with competency-based models and direct assessment, such programs are poised to take off. The trend is moving beyond just a few institutions like Western Governors University, as even Harvard Business School, for example, launched its HBX CORe program, a “boot camp” for liberal arts college students who want to understand the fundamentals of business. 
  • Innovation 4:  Personalized Adaptive Learning
  • Personalization has been the hallmark of contemporary retailing and marketing, and now it’s coming to higher education
  • But recognition of the fact that all students do not learn best by following the same path at the same pace is beginning to influence instructional design even in traditional courses, which are beginning to offer students customized trajectories through course material.
  • Innovation 5:  Curricular Optimization
  • Convinced that a curricular smorgasbord of disconnected classes squanders faculty resources and allows too many students to graduate without a serious understanding of the sweep of human history, the diversity of human cultures, the major systems of belief and value, or great works of art, literature, and music, a growing number of institutions have sought to create a more coherent curriculum for at least a portion of their student body.
  • Innovation 6:  Open Educational Resources
  • companies like Learning Ace are creating new portals that allow faculty and students to easily search for content in e-books, subscription databases, and on the web.
  • Innovation 7:  Shared Services
  • By promoting system-wide or state-wide purchasing, institutions seek to take advantage of scale in procurement of software and other services.
  • large-scale data storage, and high bandwidth data access, enables researchers within 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with one another
  • Innovation 8:  Articulation Agreements
  • As more and more students enroll in community college to save money, a great challenge is to insure that courses at various institutions are truly equivalent, which will require genuine collaboration between faculty members on multiple campuses.
  • Innovation 9:  Flipped Classrooms
  • By inverting the classroom, off-loading direct instruction and maximizing the value of face-to-face time, the flipped classroom are supposed to help students understand course material  in greater depth.
  • Institutions like MIT, “Future of MIT Education” and Stanford, “Stanford2025,” aware of such tensions and risks, are taking both bottom-up and top-down approaches to ensure they get the best of the flipped classroom without sacrificing face-to-face interactions.
  • Innovation 10:  One-Stop Student Services
  • A growing number of institutions are launching a single contact point for student services, whether involving registration, billing, and financial aid, academic support, or career advising.  The most innovative, inspired by the example of the for-profits, make services available anytime. When it opens in Fall 2015, the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which will serve an expansive 60-mile-wide region, will offer students a holistic student lifecycle management and CRM and support system accessible across the region.
  • Even as these ten innovations gradually become part of the higher education ecosystem, several new educational models are appearing, which potentially challenge business as usual.
  • Model 1:  New Pathways to a Bachelors Degree
  • Early college/dual enrollment programs that grant high school students college credit.  Expanded access to Advanced Placement courses. Bachelor degree-granting community colleges. Three-year bachelors degree programs. All of these efforts to accelerate time to degree are gaining traction. Particularly disruptive is the way students now consume higher education, acquiring credits in a variety of ways from various providers, face-to-face and online.
  • Model 2:  The Bare-bones University
  • The University of North Texas’s Dallas campus, designed with the assistance of Bain & Company, the corporate management consulting  firm, has served as a prototype for a lower-cost option, with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring, hybrid and online courses (to minimize facilities’ costs), and a limited number of majors tied to local workforce needs. 
  • Model 3:  Experimental Models
  • Minerva Project, seek to reinvent the university experience by combining a low residency model, real-world work experience through internships, and significantly reduced degree costs through scaled online learning
  • the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, and other online-only institutions have created physical locations and even MOOC providers stress the importance of learner MeetUps and are focused on implementing hybrid courses on traditional campuses.
  • While some corporations partner with academic institutions (GM, for example, offers a MBA through Indiana University), the number of stand-alone corporate universities now exceeds 4,200
  • Model 4:  Corporate Universities
  • Although these corporate units do not offer degrees, they may well pose a threat to traditional universities in two ways.  First, by their very existence, the corporate universities infer that existing undergraduate institutions fail to prepare their graduates for the workplace. Second, these entities may well displace enrollment in existing graduate and continuing education programs.
  • Model 5: All of the Above
  • The irony may be that all the so-called disruption will actually bring higher education back to its core mission. In the words of the public intellectual du jour, William Deresiewicz, “My ultimate hope is that [college] becomes recognized as a right of citizenship, and that we make sure that that right is available to all.”
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 07 Oct 14
     
    "With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as "disruptive innovation" have abated.  No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation."
Sasha Thackaberry

Edmonds Community College: PACE-IT Program - 0 views

www.edcc.edu/default.html

competency-based CBE programming IT program college community Edmonds

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 18 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 18 Jun 15
     
    CBE programs in data management, ethical hacker, introduction to network security, technology and integration support, and web developer.
anonymous

Ownership and Agency Will Propel STEM Learning | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...el-stem-learning-matt-levinson

shared by anonymous on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Learner agency is characterized by a pedagogy that builds on the passions of learners and also has real world relevance. We are seeing numerous examples of this in our schools, and the school structure is also beginning to change to accommodate this transition. Schools are adopting more flexible schedules, new and more personalized methods of reporting are being adopted, and examples of hands-on experiences from outdoor learning to community business partnerships are flourishing. Many do see learner agency as being key to the future of schooling.
  • Kids are learning many STEM skills, but it's not happening in schools.
  • Wozniak experienced inspiration from his high school electronics teacher, who provided foundational instruction that set him on a path of self-directed learning which would revolutionize personal computing.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What the PISA found, according to its manager Andreas Schleicher and as reported by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, is
  • The single entity and mode of delivery may need rethinking to account for the wealth of access to information now in place with the Internet and mobile technology.
  • Students can grow frustrated by not feeling ownership over their learning, and can get trapped in a power struggle with teachers over choice and direction with learning.
  • All the building blocks are in place for breakthroughs: the Internet goes everywhere. Everyone has a device connected to the network. And the cost of technology experimentation is so low.
  • that the most successful students are those who feel real "ownership" of their education. In all the best performing school systems, said Schleicher, "students feel they personally can make a difference in their own outcomes and that education will make a difference for their future.”
  • The single entity of the teacher needs to be reconsidered and recalibrated.
  • The learning paradigm is shifting toward student "agency."
  • Learner agency is characterized by a pedagogy that builds on the passions of learners and also has real world relevance. We are seeing numerous examples of this in our schools, and the school structure is also beginning to change to accommodate this transition. Schools are adopting more flexible schedules, new and more personalized methods of reporting are being adopted, and examples of hands-on experiences from outdoor learning to community business partnerships are flourishing. Many do see learner agency as being key to the future of schooling.
  • anonymous on 09 Jan 14
     
    Great article that advocated for "Learner Agency" - models of education that give learners more control.
Sasha Thackaberry

Reclaiming Innovation Can we reclaim innovation? - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...default.html

innovation learning education teaching technology gaming lms company data

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • what's not to like about innovation?
  • Yet as 2014 churns on, the glow is wearing off. Today, innovation is increasingly conflated with hype, disruption for disruption's sake, and outsourcing laced with a dose of austerity-driven downsizing. Call it innovation fatigue.
  • Audrey Watters has noted the essentially apocalyptic flavor of what she describes as "the myth and the millennialism of disruptive innovation" — mythic in the sense that it prophesies "the destruction of the old and the ascension of the new" and constitutes a narrative that "has been widely accepted as unassailably true." When applied to education, disruptive innovation promises nothing less than "the end of school as we know it."
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Benjamin Bratton has argued: "'Innovation' defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo."3
  • Will a countervailing vision of grassroots, generative innovation dedicated to strengthening higher education do better?4 If we think the open web and public education are ideas worth preserving, we have no option but to try to find out.
  • The demands of sustaining infrastructure have continued to dominate institutional priorities, and the recent promise of Web 2.0 has been unevenly integrated into campus strategies: instances of broad, culture-shifting experimentation along these lines in higher education can be counted on one hand
  • Meanwhile, IT organizations are often defined by what's necessary rather than what's possible, and the cumulative weight of an increasingly complex communications infrastructure weighs ever heavier.
  • Higher education overall, perhaps concerned about the untamed territories of the open web and facing unquestionably profound challenges in extending its promise beyond the early adopters, cast its lot with a "system" that promised to "manage" this wild potential and peril.
  • before we even begin to encounter the software itself, we privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a "system" to "manage" it.
  • Systems.
  • But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.
  • Silos.
  • There is a discussion to be had about where/when student interactions might merit or benefit from some degree of privacy and where/when we need to consider protections of identity and personal privacy. But that discussion happens too rarely; it is easier to default to locking everything behind digital slabs of access controls and inaccessible online spaces. Worse yet, this enclosure not only cuts the academy off from the wider world but also cuts students off from each other and the institution. Courses are severely limited in the ability to access other courses even within the institution (so much for "connecting silos"), and when courses end, students are typically cast out, unable to refer to past activity in their ongoing studies or in their lives (so much for "promoting lifelong learning").
  • Missed Opportunities.
  • even in an era when it is widely understood that we need to guide our students into an information age of immense complexity, promise, and uncertainty, we force them to spend countless hours on computers in a virtual environment that does nothing to equip them with practical web skills
  • Costs.
  • And any technologists who have been involved in a migration from one system to another, or in significant upgrades of the same system, can testify to how time-consuming and troublesome these processes will be. As Martin Weller argues: "This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution.
  • The myriad costs associated with supporting LMSs crowd out budget and staff time that might be directed toward homegrown, open-source, and user-driven innovation.
  • Confidence.
  • LMSs are seen as, at best, a "necessary evil." But perhaps they're not so necessary.
  • Before directing activity to a complex, locked-down system, ask: "Do we really need to do it this way? Is there a simpler, cheaper, open alternative that will do the job?"
  • Can We Reclaim Innovation?
  • , Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have become the poster child of innovation in higher education over the last two to three years. This approach was started by two Canadians — George Siemens and Stephen Downes — at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2008. The professor (Siemens) and the government researcher (Downes) decided to put into practice the connectivism and connected learning theories that they had been writing about and experimenting with for years. Their 2008 course, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK08), christened the idea of the MOOC and provided a brilliant example of educational technology praxis using the open web. Significantly, these origins of the MOOC arguably mark it as the first web-native learning environment, as opposed to e-learning that grafts old-style distance learning onto online platforms.
  • Yet within a couple of years, the experimentation and possibility of the MOOC movement had become co-opted and rebranded by venture capitalists as a fully formed, disruptive solution to the broken model of higher education.11 The most distressing part of the story is that many higher education administrators and even IT professionals seem to have little or no idea where the innovation started.
  • One encouraging result of the MOOC mania is the rising interest in open online learning, even if in this case innovation has become synonymous with how to scale a single course for many users.
  • MOOCs, currently being reimagined (and resold) by proprietary environments designed for scale and simplicity, lack the basic Web 2.0 premises of aggregation, openness, tagging, portability, reuse, multichannel distribution, syndication, and user-as-contributor.
  • These courses and systems are also distracting colleges and universities from the conversation that we should have been having since the late 1990s: how can we leverage open platforms and open access to augment our teaching and learning mission?13 Open-source, searchable, syndicated, and collaborative authoring systems can provide numerous efficiencies, such as publishing to multiple environments and ensuring interoperability and long-term digital preservation.
  • Imagine what higher education institutions could do if they started approaching academic publishing platforms as collaborative, open spaces for community-authored materials. What if educational institutions start reclaiming innovative learning on the web?14
Sasha Thackaberry

Direct2Degree: College One Course at a Time (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...degree-college-one-course-time

degree CBE competency competency-based education review educause time college edu

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 23 May 14 - No Cached
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 23 May 14
     
    Kentucky Community and Technical College System Direct2Degree has competency-based environments. Monthly subscriptions for tuition.
Sasha Thackaberry

Leading The Future Of Learning Through Four Key Trends - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...arning-through-four-key-trends

FutureEducation DigitalStrategy Forbes William Lindsey EducationReform Education2.0 Online Teaching teaching disruptive innovation unbundling 2.0

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Rather than mastering specific sets of skills or areas of topical knowledge, education increasingly is a continuing journey marked by learning more and more deeply about one’s own capabilities while also serving and communicating with others. Today’s revolution isn’t about having a talent that digital and other learning opportunities help us to improve so much as being a talent who can grow in an organization and a community with others who are growing with us.
Sasha Thackaberry

Competency-based education gets a boost from the Education Department @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...ets-boost-education-department

education department gets competency-based financial aid

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday the department announced a new round of its “experimental sites” initiative, which waives certain rules for federal aid programs so institutions can test new approaches without losing their aid eligibility. Many colleges may ramp up their experiments with competency-based programs -- and sources said more than 350 institutions currently offer or are seeking to create such degree tracks.
  • the federal program could help lay the groundwork for regulation and legislation that is better-suited to competency-based learning.
  • Supporters of competency-based education called the experimental sites announcement a big win.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • “The department recognizes that this is new territory and they don't have a regulatory framework for it,” said Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University.
  • Colleges have faced plenty of red tape as they seek to give competency-based education a try. That is particularly true for “direct assessment” programs, the most aggressive version, which does not rely on the traditional credit hour standard.
  • Only two institutions -- College for America, a subsidiary of Southern New Hampshire, and Capella University -- have been successful in the lengthy process of getting the department and regional accrediting agencies to approve direct assessment programs. Other institutions have tried and either were rebuffed by the feds or are still waiting for the final word.
  • For example, the University of Wisconsin-Extension last year created ambitious direct assessment degree tracks. But the university has had to cover for the absence of federal aid for its “Flex Program” by spending more on grants for students. Officials with the system said Tuesday they were eager to participate in the experimental sites program.
  • Clearing the Way
  • The latest round of experimental sites grew out of a request for ideas the department issued last year. Many colleges sent in suggestions.
  • Mitchell drew rave reviews from several participants in the Washington, D.C., meeting of the Lumina Foundation-funded group, which is called the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN).
  • Jim Selbe is a special assistant to the chancellor of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, which is a pioneer in competency-based programs in the two-year sector.
  • Experimental site status would give the Kentucky system the ability to “be broader and have more flexibility,” said Selbe. “This is going to give us a chance to really go field test.”
  • For example, Selbe said, the system is considering new programs that would charge students a monthly fee for all they can learn. This subscription-style approach could also apply to four-month terms.
  • A move by the Kentucky system to try subscriptions is “impossible right now” under federal aid rules, said Selbe. But experimental sites could open the door to monthly aid disbursements, saving students time and money. “This will give us a boost to go forward.”
  • The department said it is seeking experiments in four areas. They should increase academic quality and reduce costs, the feds have said. And the announcement said the department would conduct evaluations of the selected programs, to test their effectiveness
  • The four targeted areas include self-paced competency-based programs, such as direct assessment degree tracks. Colleges can also test “hybrid” programs, which combine elements of direct assessment and credit-hour-based coursework. That version is currently not allowed under federal rules.
  • The new experimental sites will also include prior-learning assessment
  • Finally, the program will test federal work-study programs under which college students mentor high school students in college readiness, student aid, career counseling and financial literacy
  • Experimental sites programs have rarely been so promising, said Amy Laitinen, deputy director of the New America Foundation's higher education program and a former official at the department and White House.
  • “We don't have to wait for a reauthorization,” she said. “We can inform a reauthorization.”
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