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What the PISA found, according to its manager Andreas Schleicher and as reported by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, is

The single entity and mode of delivery may need rethinking to account for the wealth of access to information now in place with the Internet and mobile technology.

that the most successful students are those who feel real "ownership" of their education. In all the best performing school systems, said Schleicher, "students feel they personally can make a difference in their own outcomes and that education will make a difference for their future.”

All the building blocks are in place for breakthroughs: the Internet goes everywhere. Everyone has a device connected to the network. And the cost of technology experimentation is so low.

Students can grow frustrated by not feeling ownership over their learning, and can get trapped in a power struggle with teachers over choice and direction with learning.

The single entity of the teacher needs to be reconsidered and recalibrated.

The learning paradigm is shifting toward student "agency."

Learner agency is characterized by a pedagogy that builds on the passions of learners and also has real world relevance. We are seeing numerous examples of this in our schools, and the school structure is also beginning to change to accommodate this transition. Schools are adopting more flexible schedules, new and more personalized methods of reporting are being adopted, and examples of hands-on experiences from outdoor learning to community business partnerships are flourishing. Many do see learner agency as being key to the future of schooling.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

The latest round of experimental sites grew out of a request for ideas the department issued last year. Many colleges sent in suggestions.

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).

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

The new experimental sites will also include prior-learning assessment

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

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

University of Wisconsin Extension has learned firsthand since it launched its Flexible Option CBE program in 2013

currently has about 1,000 students pursuing everything from certificates in technical writing to bachelor’s degrees in science and nursing, diagnostic imaging, and information studies and technology.

The registry will include all kinds of credentials – from educational degrees and certificates to industry certifications, occupational licenses, and micro-credentials.

will develop a Credential Directory app, which will allow registry users to access the websites of participating credential issuers, build customized directories of credentials based on their own criteria, and publish the results.

The goals are transparency and clarity, and to help align credentials with the needs of students, job seekers, workers and employers.