They need continuous, just-in-time support that includes professional development, mentors, and informal collaborations.
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Teaching Section of US Tech Plan 2016 - 2 views
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roughly half say that lack of training is one of the biggest barriers to incorporating technology into their teaching.
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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.
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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.
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Side-by-side, students and teachers can become engineers of collaboration, designers of learning experiences, leaders, guides, and catalysts of change.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses - 0 views
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Online Teaching teaching evaluation onlinelearning assessment best practices technology Pedagogy
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A Taxonomy of Adaptive Analytics Strategies |e-Literate - 0 views
MET Project :: Welcome - 0 views
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An "All You Can Eat" College Degree Could Be The Future Of Higher Education | Co.Exist ... - 0 views
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The model is fundamentally different, however, than any other adult bachelor programs that you’ve heard of. Students will pay a flat subscription fee of $2,250 for three month’s of “all you can eat” access. During that time. they’ll be able to use the school’s instructional content online, its advisors, and other resources. More importantly, they’ll be welcome to try to pass as many “competency tests” as they want.
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“We are in essence creating a virtual university--a new one,” says Ray Cross, Chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “What is a full-time student in a self-paced competency-based model? Well, we’ve got to define that.”
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Only 10 students will be accepted for each degree program in January 2014, but as the program expands, Cross says the “sky is the limit,” especially given how many students are open to self-taught online courses around the world.
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The Lumina Foundation just awarded the university a $1.25 million grant to evaluate the program and document its creation so that it can be replicated at other schools.
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For public universities, new ways of thinking about fundamental business models are becoming a necessity. “Our reliance on state funding is shrinking, and that’s true in every state that I'm aware of,” says Cross. “But it’s increasingly difficult for students to afford higher education costs at all levels. That is not a sustainable trend. It just is not. We need to seek alternatives.”
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Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education | EDUCAUSE - 2 views
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the "4 Rs" that have emerged as the dominant metrics in higher education: Rankings Research Real Estate Rah! (Sports)
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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"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
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The good news for students is that following this hollowing out, institutions will provide a higher return on investment.
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premium providers will utilize technology for some delivery but will focus on immersive, intensive, employer-focused and -facing experiences for students
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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If any product or service should be designed so that a stoned freshman can figure it out, it should be higher education.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even more shocking, approximately half of institutions that claimed to hit budget were reporting against downward-revised budget numbers.5
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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neither dot-com entrepreneurs nor MOOCs have produced courseware that is truly disruptive to higher education.
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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.
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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
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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.
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It could be the "software" that Andreessen foretold and that colleges and universities have long feared.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Each of these is a potential revenue stream for competency marketplaces, either from the employer or from the education provider.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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the federal program could help lay the groundwork for regulation and legislation that is better-suited to competency-based learning.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The latest round of experimental sites grew out of a request for ideas the department issued last year. Many colleges sent in suggestions.
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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).
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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Navigating the CBE Frontier: At the Educational Crossroads | The EvoLLLution - 2 views
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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.
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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]
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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]
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.