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Perhaps the most outdated feature of our current higher education system is how we measure learning. Today, this is done according to the amount of time spent at desks and in classrooms—or sometimes even time spent online—rather than by how much students actually absorb and subsequently what they do with that knowledge.

But what would happen if we turned this system on its head? What if college credits were awarded based not on seat time, but rather on measurable learning? What if we prioritized outcomes over inputs?

So it’s time for a change. It’s time for a system that awards learning credits that are based on learning, not time. It’s time for a student-centered credentialing system that prioritizes what you know and can do over where and how you get your education. And the only way to do this is to remove and replace the credit hour.

we know the basic aspects of the higher education system the nation needs: At its core, it’s a system that offers multiple, clearly marked pathways to various levels of student success—pathways that are affordable, clear and interconnected, with no dead ends, no cul-de-sacs and plenty of on- and off-ramps.

all learning certified as high-quality should count—no matter how, when, or where it was obtained.

In the ideal scenario, then, in this new system every student will know where they are going, how much it will cost to get there, how much time it will take, and what to expect at journey’s end—both in terms of learning outcomes and career prospects.

We must focus on learning outcomes as the true measure of educational quality. Not time, not institutional reputation (like the US News & World Report and other rankings do), but genuine learning. That is, those competencies that are informed by the real world in which students must thrive.

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

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.

"I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial,"

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.

"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."

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."

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.

"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.

"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?"

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.

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."

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.

But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.

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").

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

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.

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?"

, 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.

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

One risk, according to the auditor, was that colleges and universities would create programs that were just correspondence courses, without any meaningful interaction between students and faculty. Another risk was that students might receive Title IV federal funding for their life experience, without using the school’s learning resources.

the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, had approved the school’s first competency-based degree program: a master's of health professions. The distance learning program is aimed at working professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and social work.

The program doesn’t have traditional campus-based classes — its students interact with mentors by phone, email, video chat, or, for students and mentors near each other, in person.

The Flexible Option program at University of Wisconsin System offers five competency-based online certificates and degrees, targeting adult students with college credits but no degrees.

Wisconsin won approval from the Education Department and an accreditor for its self-paced, direct assessment arts and sciences associate’s degree.

The program is “transdisciplinary” — open to students in any discipline — with a theme-based organization and learning driven by problem-solving instead of how much time is spent in the classroom.

students receive credit based on learned and demonstrated competencies.

Western charges a flat-rate tuition for every six months of enrollment, and students’ advancement is based on what they can prove they know

The 2-year-old program has partnered with 55 employers to create programs for job-specific skills. College for America claims to be the only program of its kind to be approved by a regional accrediting agency and by the Department of Education for Title IV federal financial aid, although the Education Department says there is one other.

The university allows students to receive credit for knowledge already gained through their experience with a “prior learning assessment.” As of Jan. 23, Capella and Southern New Hampshire had the only two programs approved by the Department of Education to receive Title IV financial aid, according to the department.

Northern Arizona University offers a competency-based online learning program, called Personalized Learning, that allows students to use their previous experience to pass pretests and opt out of certain lessons.

is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.