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anonymous

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Co... - 1 views

www.fastcompany.com/...y-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb

MOOC udacity online education moocs

shared by anonymous on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Higher education is an enormous business in the United States--we spend approximately $400 billion annually on universities, a figure greater than the revenues of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter combined
  • The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype.
  • If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • "I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial,"
  • It's hard to imagine a story that more thoroughly flatters the current sensibilities of Silicon Valley than the one into which Thrun stumbled. Not only is reinventing the university a worthy goal--tuition prices at both public and private colleges have soared in recent years, and the debt burden borne by American students is more than $1 trillion--but it's hard to imagine an industry more ripe for disruption than one in which the professionals literally still don medieval robes. "Education hasn't changed for 1,000 years," says Peter Levine, a partner with Andreessen Horowitz and a Udacity board member, summing up the Valley's conventional wisdom on the topic. "Udacity just seemed like a fundamentally new way to change how communities of people are educated."
  • "Sebastian is like the smartest guy you've ever met, but on speed,"
  • His trip in March of 2011 to the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, where he delivered a talk about his work, led to an unexpected change in his plans. Thrun movingly recounted how a high school friend had been killed in a car accident, the result of the kind of human error that self-driving cars would eliminate. Although he was well received, Thrun was upstaged by a young former hedge-fund analyst named Sal Khan, who spoke of using cheaply produced, wildly popular web videos to tutor millions of high school students on the Internet. Thrun's competitive streak kicked in. "I was a fully tenured Stanford professor . . . and here's this guy who teaches millions," he would later recount. "It was embarrassing." Though Thrun insists the timing was coincidental, just a few weeks later, he informed Stanford that he would be giving up tenure and joining Google full time as a VP. (He did continue teaching and is still a faculty member.)
  • "I can't teach at Stanford again," he said definitively. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill. And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your students. But I've taken the red pill. I've seen Wonderland."
  • And yet, all of these efforts have been hampered by the same basic problem: Very few people seem to finish courses when they're not sitting in a lecture hall.
  • Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one's own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video. Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn't arguing that Udacity's current courses would replace a traditional education--only that it would augment it. "We're not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you," he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. "The medium will change," he says.
  • "The sort of simplistic suggestion that MOOCs are going to disrupt the entire education system is very premature," he says.
  • Thrun initially approached the problem of low completion rates as one that he could solve single-handedly. "I was looking at the data, and I decided I would make a really good class," he recalls.
  • "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.
  • At a press conference the following January, Brown and Thrun announced that Udacity would open enrollment in three subjects--remedial math, college algebra, and elementary statistics--and they would count toward credit at San Jose State University, a 30,000-student public college. Courses were offered for just $150 each, and students were drawn from a lower-income high school and the underperforming ranks of SJSU's student body. "A lot of these failures are avoidable," Thrun said at the press conference. "I would love to set these students up for success, not for failure."
  • Viewed within this frame, the results were disastrous. Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class, making the $150 price tag--roughly one-third the normal in-state tuition--seem like something less than a bargain. The one bright spot: Completion rates shot through the roof; 86% of students made it all the way through the classes, better than eight times Udacity's old rate.
  • "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit."
  • Udacity won't disclose how much it is making, but Levine of Andreessen Horowitz says he's pleased. "The attitude from the beginning, about how we'd make money, was, 'We'll figure it out,'" he says. "Well, we figured it out." Thrun, ever a master of academic branding, terms this sponsored-course model the Open Education Alliance and says it is both the future of Udacity and, more generally, college education. "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"
  • "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product," Thrun tells me. "It was a painful moment." Turns out he doesn't even like the term MOOC.
  • This January, several hundred computer science students around the world will begin taking classes for an online master's degree program being jointly offered by Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Fees will be substantial--$6,600 for the equivalent of a three-semester course of study--but still less than one-third of what an in-state student would pay at Georgia Tech, and one-seventh of the tuition charged to an out-of-state one.
  • Georgia Tech professors will teach the courses and handle admissions and accreditation, and students will get a Georgia Tech diploma when they're done, but Udacity will host the course material. Thrun expects the partnership to generate $1.3 million by the end of its first year. The sum will be divided 60-40 between the university and Udacity, respectively, giving the startup its single largest revenue source to date.
  • Crucially, the program won't ultimately cost either Udacity or Georgia Tech anything. Expenses are being covered by AT&T, which put up $2 million in seed capital in the hope of getting access to a new pool of well-trained engineers.
  • "There's a recruiting angle for us, but there's also a training angle," says Scott Smith, an SVP of human resources at the telco. Though Smith says the grant to Georgia Tech came with no strings attached, AT&T plans to send a large group of its employees through the program and is in talks with Udacity to sponsor additional courses as well. "That's the great thing about this model," Smith says. "Sebastian is reaching out to us and saying, 'Help us build this--and, oh, by the way, the payoff is you get instruction for your employees.'" Says Zachary, "The Georgia Tech deal isn't really a Georgia Tech deal. It's an AT&T deal."
  • anonymous on 12 Dec 13
     
    Great insights into Sebastian Thrun, and MOOCs -- especially the "sponsored MOOC." 
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
kernel7

Online Vmware Training - VMWare Certification | Kernel Training - 0 views

www.kerneltraining.com/vmware

OnlineVmwareTraining bestvmwaretraining

shared by kernel7 on 12 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • kernel7 on 12 Dec 17
     
    Certified online VMware Training by our experienced real time experts aimed to provide VMware education across the world provides a complete virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system.
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.
anonymous

Teaching Section of US Tech Plan 2016 - 2 views

tech.ed.gov/teaching

educational technology EdTech

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • They need continuous, just-in-time support that includes professional development, mentors, and informal collaborations.
  • roughly half say that lack of training is one of the biggest barriers to incorporating technology into their teaching.
  • Institutions responsible for pre-service and in-service professional development for educators should focus explicitly on ensuring all educators are capable of selecting, evaluating, and using appropriate technologies and resources to create experiences that advance student engagement and learning. They also should pay special care to make certain that educators understand the privacy and security concerns associated with technology.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • For many teacher preparation institutions, state offices of education, and school districts, the transition to technology-enabled preparation and professional development will entail rethinking instructional approaches and techniques, tools, and the skills and expertise of educators who teach in these programs.
  • Technology can empower educators to become co-learners with their students
  • Side-by-side, students and teachers can become engineers of collaboration, designers of learning experiences, leaders, guides, and catalysts of change.
  • form online professional learning communities.
  • Teacher User Groups
  • Rethinking Teacher Preparation
  • more than 100 direct mentions of technology expectations
  • every new teacher should be prepared to model how to select and use the most appropriate apps and tools to support learning and evaluate these tools against basic privacy and security standards.
  • This expertise does not come through the completion of one educational technology course separate from other methods courses but through the inclusion of experiences with educational technology in all courses modeled by the faculty in teacher preparation programs.
  • URI has found that participants experienced a dramatic increase in digital skills associated with implementing project-based learning with digital media and technology. Their understanding of digital literacy also shifted to focus more on inquiry, collaboration, and creativity.
  • Denver Public Schools Personalizes Professional Development
anonymous

Fifth Annual VitalSource/Wakefield Survey Finds College Students Want More - and Better... - 0 views

www.prnewswire.com/...room-technology-300121015.html

technology cost_of_education

shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • this year's survey results point to technology as a way to increase students' participation in class and to more efficiently complete assigned work or digest course materials. Students identified other ways to improve their learning experience, including: 61% of students said that homework that is more interactive, containing elements such as video, would improve learning 48% of students said their learning would be enhanced by technology that helps them collaborate digitally with students from their class, or from other schools 61% cited the ability to exchange instant feedback with professors as something that would improve learning 55% said digital learning that personalizes their learning experience (i.e. gives teachers the ability to track student progress in real-time) would be useful
  • As for the actual devices students use for their studies, laptop ownership remains steady at 90% of survey respondents for 2014 and 91% for 2015, while students owning smartphones and those owning iPads or tablets both increased by 7 percentage points in 2015 vs. the previous year. The number of surveyed students owning smartphones increased from 83% in 2014 to 90% in 2015 and tablet ownership increased from 43% in 2014 to 50% in 2015.
  • Students' expectation for access to technology in higher education continues to increase, as does the overall cost of receiving a college degree. Accordingly, the financial burden of tuition continues to be a major concern among college students, with 81% of those surveyed agreeing that over the next 10 years, fewer students will go to college because it is too expensive. For those who do pursue a degree, the cost of doing so is a long-term commitment: 54% of students surveyed this year are worried they won't be able to pay off their college loans before they are 50, in contrast to 44% of students who responded similarly to this statement in 2014
anonymous

Group of seven major universities seeks to offer online microcredentials | InsideHigherEd - 3 views

www.insidehighered.com/...-offer-online-microcredentials

competency-based prior_learning_assessment digital_badges

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Highlight
  • Highlight
  • Tentatively dubbed the University Learning Store, the project is a joint effort involving the Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Washington, the University of California’s Davis, Irvine and Los Angeles campuses, and the University of Wisconsin Extension.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The idea is to create an “alternative credentialing process that would provide students with credentials that are much shorter and cheaper than conventional degrees,”
  • As with a department store, Schejbal said, the University Learning Store is about offering students different products from different providers.
  • “Those distinctions start to fade” with microcredentials, Bushway said. “The degree is almost a distraction.”
  • Schejbal said the project’s pricing would be of the “freemium” model. That means some of the content would be free, but students would have to spend money when the universities do.
  • “Students really do need to come in and out of education across a lifetime,” said Schejbal, adding that the microcredential project is “looking at people who need them regardless of their degree level.”
  • Tutoring or other support services would also be fee based.
  • “Students will be able to buy these à la carte,” said Schejbal, “or in a package.”
  • The planned online store would not be designed to be federal aid eligible,
  • The quality of the microcredentials in many ways will hinge on the assessments students must successfully complete to earn them
  • The project’s leaders had been working with an outside provider to help build the platform. But Schejbal said the universities eventually had to change gears and begin an open-bid process. That sort of red tape, which affects public universities much more than ed-tech companies, is an example of the challenges the University Learning Store likely will face. (All but one of the group of seven universities are public.)
  • Assessments would come with a price, he said, in part because they would be graded by people rather than computers.
  • The plan is for some of the online content to feature modular instruction, said Schejbal, meaning instructors will interact with students as they progress through the material -- as with a conventional online course, but for a shorter duration.
  • Students will be able to use online content and assessments -- with pieces from different universities -- to prove what they know and can do.
  • “We’re imagining that this would be cheap enough for a student to afford without financial aid,”
anonymous

Three Critical Elements to Ensure Online Learning Programs Remain Fresh | Edudemic - 2 views

www.edudemic.com/e-online-learning-remain-fresh

future online learning

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • While instructional design was one of the catalysts for increasing student performance and overall degree completion, to date, we have not figured out how to truly leverage technology for learning and how to invent new instructional practices.
  • we have done a good job at translating pedagogical and anagogical models into the online environment, but we have not developed new instructional strategies that are germane to teaching and learning, required in remote and asynchronous learning environments
  • Instead, we have, for the most part, stuck with the ‘one to many’ model of instruction.  We have not developed models for technology-driven self-determined and directed learning
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • we have not been consistent and mindful in imbuing non-cognitive and behavioral elements directly into courses and programs to increase student success (i.e. elements for first generation, high-poverty, and high-minority students), and we have not fundamentally challenged the structure of the traditional degree (i.e. vs. stackable credentials with pathways to multiple degree options).
  • heutagogy
anonymous

Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education | EDUCAUSE - 2 views

er.educause.edu/...unbundling-of-higher-education

CBE educause competency-based degree

shared by anonymous on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • the "4 Rs" that have emerged as the dominant metrics in higher education: Rankings Research Real Estate Rah! (Sports)
  • as Purdue University President Mitch Daniels has said: "Higher education has to get past the 'take our word for it' era. Increasingly, people aren't."2
  • the market is no longer viewing the 4 Rs as proxies of excellence.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • among 27 potential factors, the U.S. News ranking came in at #20 in terms of importance in students' decision-making process. Twice as many students said that rankings were "not important at all" as those who said that they were "very important." So what do students care about? The top four factors were majors, cost, safety, and employment.3
  • We are beginning to see a similar shakeout in higher education. In a survey of 368 small private colleges and midsize state universities, 38 percent failed to meet their 2014–15 budget for both freshman enrollment and net tuition revenue.
  • If they can truly provide premium programs with a high return on investment, they will be able
  • to continue to charge high tuition. What they must not do—if they want to survive—is stand still.
  • Forced to demonstrate definitive value, midtier institutions will have to decide what they want to be when they grow up. If they're in the business of providing basic degree programs—where value to the student accrues primarily as a result of the credential itself—they will become a discount provider: delivering the program as inexpensively as possible.
  • "a full stack education company might not look like a school at all. It could look like an employer, a lender, a school, and/or a recruiter all rolled into one."6
  • The good news for students is that following this hollowing out, institutions will provide a higher return on investment.
  • premium providers will utilize technology for some delivery but will focus on immersive, intensive, employer-focused and -facing experiences for students
  • In fact, it's conceivable that the only remaining institutions with a return-on-investment profile characteristic of today's market will be the elite colleges and universities that have set the pace for higher education until now.
  • Full-stack providers that hope to achieve the higher education equivalent of Apple's or Uber's success will have to find a way to do three fundamental things: (1) develop and deliver specific high-quality educational experiences that produce graduates with capabilities that specific employers desperately want; (2) work with students to solve financing problems; and (3) connect students with employers during and following the educational experience and make sure students get a job.
  • In a decade, online education may be recognized not for making higher education accessible to anyone with a smartphone but, rather, for serving as the midwife who delivered competency-based learning into the world. Although competency-based learning is theoretically possible in a non-technology-enabled environment, it's not nearly as simple and appealing. In a competency-based environment, transfer credits become an anachronism and failure becomes a relic. In a competency-based world, the 41 percent of students who start but don't complete degree programs within six years will still receive value from the competencies they can show to prospective employers.15 Equally important, in our experience, competency-based learning reduces the cost of delivery by half over standard online delivery. Astute providers will pass the savings along to students and become leaders in the new discounter segment.
  • Some coding bootcamps even guarantee employment or tuition is refunded
  • the real higher education story of the decade is the crisis of affordability
  • The average bachelor's degree recipient who has taken out student loans carries $28,400 in debt, and 26 million consumers have two or more open student loans on their credit report.
  • Between 1999 and 2011, outstanding student loan debt grew by 511 percent; as of early 2014, it exceeded $1 trillion, more than credit card debt.10
  • In 1979, a typical student could pay his/her way through college working at the minimum wage for 182 hours, the equivalent of a part-time summer job. In 2013, the same student at the same college at the present-day minimum wage would have to work over 991 hours (a full-time job for half the year) just to cover tuition while still needing to find additional resources to pay for living expenses.11 In addition, the wealth gap between young and old has also never been wider. At the end of 2011, the typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older had a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, a number that more than doubled since 2005
  • in our current isomorphic system price continues to serve as a signal of quality
  • As a result, most institutions offering online programs have done so at the same price point as their on-ground programs; to do otherwise would send the wrong signal for a medium that is still young and thirsting for academic legitimacy.
  • If any product or service should be designed so that a stoned freshman can figure it out, it should be higher education.
  • Despite this, higher education may be the most complex product or service purportedly designed for mass consumption. This is not a comment on the difficulty of the subject matter being taught in the classroom; rather, it is a comment on the opaque and complex process of enrolling, financing, and ultimately assembling a degree. Focus groups conducted at Macomb Community College in Michigan, offering 200 degree and certificate programs to 48,000 students, revealed that very few students were able to navigate the complexities of enrollment, financial aid, transcript requests, prior credit recognition, program selection, and course selection/scheduling.
  • Because of the flawed transfer-credit system, students have difficulty identifying pathways toward a degree if they're changing institutions—something that a large percentage of them will do over the course of their studies.
  • To be successful in improving outcomes, higher education must turn the current process of program design on its head. Traditional program design is based on a system of credit hour inputs rather than outcomes. This has resulted from a culture of faculty-focused curricular development, which moves from an established curriculum to assessment and then to learning outcomes. A simpler, better system would be reverse-engineered by starting with student outcomes, then moving to the assessments that prove that the outcomes have been achieved, and only then turning to the question of what curricula best prepare students for the assessments. Fortunately, technology allows higher education to make this shift.
  • Even more shocking, approximately half of institutions that claimed to hit budget were reporting against downward-revised budget numbers.5
  • Technology's efficacy goal for online learning should be to move "focus by choice" as far as possible in the direction of "controlled focus." Two sets of technologies will accomplish this.
  • Combining adaptive learning with competency-based learning is the "killer app" of online education. Students will progress at their own pace. When they excel on formative assessments integrated into the curricula, they are served up more-challenging learning objects. And when students struggle, adaptive systems throttle back until the student is ready for more.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 15
       
      I disagree that Gamification is that important.  If we make everything they learn relevant and design learning sessions for success, fooling students into thinking they are playing games will not be needed.  Learning something relevant, is one of life's basic pleasures.
  • The second technology is gamification
  • believing that the solution to the smartphone challenge is simply allowing mobile access to the same online course is tantamount to believing that an institution's online strategy is effectively addressed by putting lectures on YouTube or iTunes.
  • In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year.
  • Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they're about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?
  • neither dot-com entrepreneurs nor MOOCs have produced courseware that is truly disruptive to higher education.
  • What if that is because the software that will disrupt higher education isn't courseware at all? What if the software is, instead, an online marketplace? Uber (market cap $40 billion) owns no vehicles. Airbnb (market cap $10 billion) owns no hotel rooms. What they do have are marketplaces with consumer-friendly interfaces. By positioning their interfaces between millions of consumers and sophisticated supply systems, Uber and Airbnb have significantly changed consumer behavior and disrupted these supply systems. Is there a similar marketplace in the higher education arena? There is, and it has 40 million college students and recent graduates on its platform. It is called LinkedIn.
  • LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has been very clear about his ambition, stating in November 2014: We want to have a profile for every member of the global work force, all 3 billion-plus people. We want to have a profile for every company in the world—that's north of 70 million companies—and digital representation of every job in the world. We also want digital representation of every skill required to obtain those jobs, a digital presence for every university in the world, and we want to make it easy for every individual company and university to share their professionally relevant knowledge. In doing all of this, we hope to allow all forms of capital to flow to where it can best be leveraged to lift and transform the global economy.2
  • Competency marketplaces will profile the competencies (or capabilities) of students and job seekers, allow them to identify the requirements of employers, evaluate the gap, and follow the educational path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost-effectively.
  • It could be the "software" that Andreessen foretold and that colleges and universities have long feared.
  • As competency marketplaces and their associated algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, employers and students will begin to value the signals from these tools more than the signals from nonelite universities' bundled degrees. (The signals from elite universities' bundled degrees will remain strong, largely due to the high caliber of the inputs.) As employees who are matched on the basis of competencies (and then hired through standard interviewing techniques for behavioral and cultural fit) excel in the workplace, this trend will only be reinforced. Employers will adjust job descriptions to reflect the incoming competencies of high-performing candidates, and competency matches will get better and better.
  • At some point, a student will walk into the college admissions office and say: "I've read your programs of study, and your Environmental Engineering program looks interesting. But how will it help me take my competency profile from where it is today to where LinkedIn says it needs to be in order to get an entry-level job as an engineer?" Colleges and universities that offer competency-based programs will at least speak the same language as this student. That's necessary, but not sufficient. A sufficient response will require unbundling the degree.
  • Likewise, colleges and universities may soon transition from the bloated degree model to an "Education-as-a-Service" (EaaS) model. Successful providers will sell students what they need when they need it: a "just-in-time" educational model that is much closer to today's coding schools than current degree programs.
  • Each of these is a potential revenue stream for competency marketplaces, either from the employer or from the education provider.
  • If ownership is held by the competency marketplace, we may find ourselves in a world where there's more money to be made from owning the competency profile than from delivering postsecondary education.
  • To avoid marginalization, colleges and universities need to insist that individuals own their competencies. Ensuring that ownership lies with the individual could make the competency profile portable and could facilitate movement across marketplaces, as well as to higher education institutions. In an era of unbundling, when colleges and universities need to move from selling degrees to selling EaaS subscriptions, the winners will be those that can turn their students into "students for life"—providing the right educational programs and experiences at the right time. This becomes possible when individuals own their competencies and allow institutions to manage their profiles, suggesting educational programs and even employment.
  • In the coming years, many institutions will succumb to the current inertia that is too prevalent in higher education. Some institutions will address some of these issues and will survive. Others will successfully address most of these issues and will then need to prepare for the next seismic change in higher education: The Great Unbundling.
anonymous

Underserved and overburdened, transfer students face an uphill battle to earn their deg... - 0 views

hechingerreport.org/l-battle-to-earn-their-degrees

PLA prior_learning_assessment

shared by anonymous on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • 37 percent of all students who began college in 2008 have transferred institutions at some point. Nearly half of transfer students transfer more than once.
  • At ASU, our university, nearly 13,500 transfer students enrolled in fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters, outnumbering first-time freshmen by more than 2,000. These transfer numbers are likely to explode in coming years, with profound consequences for students and universities alike.
  • Today, more than one-third of college students are 25 or older. Only 14 percent of college students are residential students, and 46 percent are part-time college students.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Serving transfer students better is one of the few ways to make a significant, positive impact on the cost of college and degree completion, without the need for new regulations. Every transfer student who has earned postsecondary credits must have a basic set of rights associated with turning those credits into a degree and that degree into opportunity. A bill of rights will help do just that.
  • students transferring to public institutions benefit from the highest rate of credit acceptance: 20 percent more than students transferring to private non-profit colleges and 52 percent more than students transferring to private for-profit colleges. It’s not clear what academic interests explain this disparity, especially among top public and private colleges.
  • we need a Transfer Student’s Bill of Rights that guarantees access to degree programs, sequences, and prerequisites guiding higher education to do a much better job in serving the nation’s transfer students.
  • That means ensuring all students understand what prior courses will transfer to their new institutions before choosing their next university.
  • It means having access to data from all colleges and universities about their track record accepting credit and the fine print.
  • Central to transfer students’ rights is an imperative that every higher education institution adopt an infrastructure for electronic student records exchange, so that credits can be discovered and processed in an efficient, effective and timely manner.
  • Few realize that in higher education today, we have the equivalent of thousands of local railroads, each with its own gauge track. Our independent, decentralized system of higher education has many strengths, but if we are to lead the world in degree attainment our colleges and universities must be equipped with the same institution-to-institution record exchange capabilities that sectors such as finance put in place years ago.
Gina Hall

GOOD Video: How Do We Make Learning Relevant to Students? - Education - GOOD - 1 views

www.good.is/...-learning-relevant-to-students

CAMLF video innovation learning K12 education future facilitation

shared by Gina Hall on 11 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • "I wanted to avoid the usual doom and gloom—the usual 'it's all crap and there's no hope for the future,'
  • it's about people who are out of the box of education completely who are trying to improve the system."
  • pedagogical approach that employs technology that serves new models of learning—and not just for the sake of having the newest gadget in the lab.
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  • education innovators he filmed have a fresh perspective since they're "not right on top of the issues."
  • maybe we don't need teachers anymore. While that certainly pushes buttons, Kaufman says he had to step back and realize that what Mitra means is that the role of teachers has to change from that of lecturer to facilitator, mentor, and coach.
  • how to become a citizen, how to problem solve, and learning how to be a collaborator
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.
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  • “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.
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