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Schejbal sees the difference as a great example of why competency-based education makes sense.

Traditional students may need the structured learning experience and all of the knowledge and information that comes from a standard, semester-based model because they don’t bring as much with them to the classroom. Older students, though, come to the classroom with experience from work, the military, self-study, or previous college. Schejbal says they need a more malleable learning experience that lets them demonstrate what they know, apply that knowledge to a program, and spend time learning only the additional information they need.

University Learning Store

These non-degree options are distinct from stackable credentials that Schejbal sees less value in, though he says the stackable credentials are fine if they’re within the realm of traditional credits.

Schejbal sees the value in both the traditional model for younger students and newer, alternative models for the “nontraditional” learner

But serving such a diverse student population — and doing it well — is complicated.

Schejbal says culture plays a major role in whether a college or university makes the effort to find a way. “Some institutions have both cultures and business models that are rooted in traditional higher education structures,” Schejbal said. “Those institutions have very little incentive to change.”

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

discovering

Carol Dweck

fixed mindset to those of a growth mindset

Learning that incorporates the arts, movement or physical enactment offers students opportunities to engage their academic subjects through talents and abilities which they have not previously recognized as being relevant to their scholastic and cognitive potentials

artistic activities should be authentic and meaningful; they should not be perceived by students as "add-on fluff" to academic subjects.

reduces mistake anxiety by removing expectations for a single correct response or product

ability to delay immediate gratification and to apply effort toward goals that are not immediate

positive learning and assessment experiences continue and students begin to build confidence

apply more effort, collaborate successfully, ask questions, revise work and review foundational knowledge

increased attention span in general and improved critical thinking

experience in symbolic representation of academic learning with the neural activity seen when the brain processes information using the highest forms of cognition, creative problem solving, critical analysis and innovation.

Glass (1977) identifies six techniques for determining the criterion score or point in criterion-referenced assessment: (i) the performance of others, (ii) counting backwards from 100%, (iii) bootstrapping on other criterion scores, (iv) judging minimal competence, (v) decision-theoretic approaches, (vi) operations research methods [ 3]. He argues that educational movements in the USA like accountability, mastery learning, competency-based education and the like rest on the common notion that a minimal acceptable level of performance on a task can be specified.

To put it bluntly there is a massive mismatch between the appealing language of precision that surrounds competency or performance-based programmes and the imprecise, approximate and often arbitrary character of testing when applied to human capabilities.

If competence is about what people can do then at first sight it appears to circumvent the issue of what people need to know-it shifts the balance of power firmly in the direction of practice and away from theory. It focuses attention on questions of relevance: knowledge for what purpose? By making education and training more practical, by emphasising what a person can do rather than what they know, competency-based approaches supposedly make access more open.

What is needed are standards of criticism and principles of professional judgement that can inform action in the context of uncertainty and change.

actions cannot in themselves be seen as competent. Rather, competence is to be located in the accounts used to license or warrant actions. In this analysis the mark of a competent practitioner, in this instance police officers, is one who can choose the right account for the right audience. The approach recognises that what is good practice cannot be defined simply by reference to the function of the organisation or its aims and objectives. There are, Fielding would argue, a plurality of audiences who may or may not judge competence in similar ways.

locates the definition of competence firmly within the interaction between values and situational decision-making

there is nothing new about competency-based approaches to education and training

Cambridge Journal of Education. Nov91, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p331. 11

"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."