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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.

Kids are learning many STEM skills, but it's not happening in schools.

Wozniak experienced inspiration from his high school electronics teacher, who provided foundational instruction that set him on a path of self-directed learning which would revolutionize personal computing.

Rather than mastering specific sets of skills or areas of topical knowledge, education increasingly is a continuing journey marked by learning more and more deeply about one’s own capabilities while also serving and communicating with others. Today’s revolution isn’t about having a talent that digital and other learning opportunities help us to improve so much as being a talent who can grow in an organization and a community with others who are growing with us.

The government should learn from its lessons and shift from funding based on inputs to focusing on incentivizing the outcomes it would like to see from higher education.

A better path forward would be for the federal government to encourage a variety of experiments over the coming years that try out different approaches in a controlled way, all while releasing programs from the current input-based constraints to learn what works, in what combinations and circumstances, and what are the unintended consequences.

A key tenet of all the efforts is that employers, along with students, are likely best positioned to determine program quality—and programs that align their assessments to the competencies employers need will likely be in a strong place.

online competency-based education stands out as the innovation most likely to disrupt higher education.

As traditional institutions struggle to innovate from within and other education technology vendors attempt to plug and play into the existing system, online competency-based providers release learning from the constraints of the academy. By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter—these providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market.

The fusion of modularization with mastery-based learning is the key to understanding how these providers can build a multitude of stackable credentials or programs for a wide variety of industries, scale them, and simultaneously drive down the cost of educating students for the opportunities at hand. These programs target a growing set of students who are looking for a different value proposition from higher education—one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, as well as identifiable skillsets that are portable and meaningful to employers.

a lack of transparency in the current credentialing maze has fueled the confusion and created a buyer-beware environment.

When every credential is unique to its issuer and impossible to compare with others, they all lose their value to job seekers and employers.

Funded by Lumina Foundation, the initiative will develop common terms for describing key features of credentials; create a voluntary, web-based registry for sharing the resulting information; and test practical apps (software applications) for employers, students, educators, and other credential stakeholders.

In 2014 the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) identified three key motivators for faculty use of IT: (1) evidence of benefit to students, (2) course release time, and (3) confidence the technology will work.1

In particular, we found that faculty use of the grade center, which ECAR found that students value more than any LMS function,2 is positively related to student outcomes.

To frame our discussion, consider the following: If you could predict with 100 percent accuracy which students would succeed or fail — in classes, programs, or graduation — what would you do to intervene and change the predicted outcome? Or as Mike Sharkey, VP of Analytics at Blackboard, often says, "If you're a dog chasing a car, what would you actually do if you caught it?"