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The Higher Education Act of 1965 is due for reauthorization this year, and direct assessment programs could be in the spotlight. The law, which governs how federal student aid functions, could see some major changes later this year. As part of ongoing discussions for revisiting the act, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation in July that would aid colleges employing competency-based education programs, according to Inside Higher Ed. The educational approach allows students to pursue a degree based on their demonstration of skill mastery instead of their letter grades. The intent is to provide more concrete skills that translate directly to a work environment rather than a theoretical educational approach.

Here, we present an overview of three of those presentations. First, Ellen Wagner, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's Cooperative for Education Technologies (WICHE/WCET), noted that any discussion of educational breakthroughs in postsecondary education needed to acknowledge the catalytic role of MOOCs for reframing the discussion around flexible learning, but that so many other sessions featured MOOCs our intention was to acknowledge them and to move on to other innovations, including personalized learning, competency-based education, and badges as alternative credentials.

WCET helped produced a MOOC on badges as currency for credentials;

In the context of the traditional classroom, Internet-connected devices risk distracting from the learning process more than they aid it.

properly implementing the technology simply requires an adjustment period on the part of the students, the teachers, or both

In 2014 the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) identified three key motivators for faculty use of IT: (1) evidence of benefit to students, (2) course release time, and (3) confidence the technology will work.1

In particular, we found that faculty use of the grade center, which ECAR found that students value more than any LMS function,2 is positively related to student outcomes.

To frame our discussion, consider the following: If you could predict with 100 percent accuracy which students would succeed or fail — in classes, programs, or graduation — what would you do to intervene and change the predicted outcome? Or as Mike Sharkey, VP of Analytics at Blackboard, often says, "If you're a dog chasing a car, what would you actually do if you caught it?"