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anonymous

Group of seven major universities seeks to offer online microcredentials | InsideHigherEd - 3 views

www.insidehighered.com/...-offer-online-microcredentials

competency-based prior_learning_assessment digital_badges

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 15 - No Cached
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  • Tentatively dubbed the University Learning Store, the project is a joint effort involving the Georgia Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Washington, the University of California’s Davis, Irvine and Los Angeles campuses, and the University of Wisconsin Extension.
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  • The idea is to create an “alternative credentialing process that would provide students with credentials that are much shorter and cheaper than conventional degrees,”
  • As with a department store, Schejbal said, the University Learning Store is about offering students different products from different providers.
  • “Those distinctions start to fade” with microcredentials, Bushway said. “The degree is almost a distraction.”
  • Schejbal said the project’s pricing would be of the “freemium” model. That means some of the content would be free, but students would have to spend money when the universities do.
  • “Students really do need to come in and out of education across a lifetime,” said Schejbal, adding that the microcredential project is “looking at people who need them regardless of their degree level.”
  • Tutoring or other support services would also be fee based.
  • “Students will be able to buy these à la carte,” said Schejbal, “or in a package.”
  • The planned online store would not be designed to be federal aid eligible,
  • The quality of the microcredentials in many ways will hinge on the assessments students must successfully complete to earn them
  • The project’s leaders had been working with an outside provider to help build the platform. But Schejbal said the universities eventually had to change gears and begin an open-bid process. That sort of red tape, which affects public universities much more than ed-tech companies, is an example of the challenges the University Learning Store likely will face. (All but one of the group of seven universities are public.)
  • Assessments would come with a price, he said, in part because they would be graded by people rather than computers.
  • The plan is for some of the online content to feature modular instruction, said Schejbal, meaning instructors will interact with students as they progress through the material -- as with a conventional online course, but for a shorter duration.
  • Students will be able to use online content and assessments -- with pieces from different universities -- to prove what they know and can do.
  • “We’re imagining that this would be cheap enough for a student to afford without financial aid,”
Sasha Thackaberry

Higher Education 2.0 and the Next Few Hundred Years; or, How to Create a New Higher Edu... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...new-higher-education-ecosystem

higher higher education education educause review edu ecosystem 2.0 3.0

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 07 May 15 - No Cached
  • AAC&U's GEMs project and WICHE's Interstate Passport Initiative.3
  • Fundamental questions surrounding CBE, where we still lack an agreed-upon taxonomy and nomenclature
  • Those changes were painful, and many stakeholders, unable to adjust to a new industry ecosystem, disappeared or were greatly diminished. Higher education, infinitely more complicated, may nevertheless be on the cusp of a similar revolution, leading to a new higher education ecosystem.
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 07 May 15
     
    "Three important developments stand to dramatically change the way we think about degree programs and pathways: The rapid adoption of competency-based education (CBE) programs, often using industry and employer authority for guiding the creation of the competencies and thus programs An eventual move to suborganizational accreditation, with Title IV funds available for credits, courses, and microcredentials offered by new providers in new delivery models, part of the accelerating trend toward "unbundling" higher education Increasing recognition that postsecondary education will no longer be contained to the existing and traditional degree levels but will instead be consumed at various levels of granularity-less than full degree programs and continuing throughout lives and careers"
Sasha Thackaberry

Strategy 8: New Systems of Quality Credentials | Lumina - 0 views

www.luminafoundation.org/systems-of-quality-credentials

strategy quality credentials badges digital CBE competency-based competency

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 12 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 12 Jul 15
     
    Lumina's creating a new system of credentials. Are degrees at risk? Will microcredentialing and digital badges stick?
Sasha Thackaberry

The Future of Higher Education | Higher Ed Beta @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...future-higher-education

future higher higher education education higher ed beta

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 07 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as “disruptive innovation” have abated. 
  • No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation.
  • The innovations taking place may not seem to be as dramatic as those that loomed in 2012, but the consequences are likely be even more far-reaching, challenging established business and staffing models.
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  • Innovation 1:  Learning Analytics
  • Innovation 2:  Microcredentialing
  • Innovation 3:  Competency-Based Education
  • Especially attractive is competency-based education’s prospect of accelerating time to degree, since students can potentially receive credit for skills and knowledge acquired through life experience or alternative forms of education.
  • But with the U.S. Department of Education and accreditors increasingly willing to allow institutions to experiment with competency-based models and direct assessment, such programs are poised to take off. The trend is moving beyond just a few institutions like Western Governors University, as even Harvard Business School, for example, launched its HBX CORe program, a “boot camp” for liberal arts college students who want to understand the fundamentals of business. 
  • Innovation 4:  Personalized Adaptive Learning
  • Personalization has been the hallmark of contemporary retailing and marketing, and now it’s coming to higher education
  • But recognition of the fact that all students do not learn best by following the same path at the same pace is beginning to influence instructional design even in traditional courses, which are beginning to offer students customized trajectories through course material.
  • Innovation 5:  Curricular Optimization
  • Convinced that a curricular smorgasbord of disconnected classes squanders faculty resources and allows too many students to graduate without a serious understanding of the sweep of human history, the diversity of human cultures, the major systems of belief and value, or great works of art, literature, and music, a growing number of institutions have sought to create a more coherent curriculum for at least a portion of their student body.
  • Innovation 6:  Open Educational Resources
  • companies like Learning Ace are creating new portals that allow faculty and students to easily search for content in e-books, subscription databases, and on the web.
  • Innovation 7:  Shared Services
  • By promoting system-wide or state-wide purchasing, institutions seek to take advantage of scale in procurement of software and other services.
  • large-scale data storage, and high bandwidth data access, enables researchers within 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with one another
  • Innovation 8:  Articulation Agreements
  • As more and more students enroll in community college to save money, a great challenge is to insure that courses at various institutions are truly equivalent, which will require genuine collaboration between faculty members on multiple campuses.
  • Innovation 9:  Flipped Classrooms
  • By inverting the classroom, off-loading direct instruction and maximizing the value of face-to-face time, the flipped classroom are supposed to help students understand course material  in greater depth.
  • Institutions like MIT, “Future of MIT Education” and Stanford, “Stanford2025,” aware of such tensions and risks, are taking both bottom-up and top-down approaches to ensure they get the best of the flipped classroom without sacrificing face-to-face interactions.
  • Innovation 10:  One-Stop Student Services
  • A growing number of institutions are launching a single contact point for student services, whether involving registration, billing, and financial aid, academic support, or career advising.  The most innovative, inspired by the example of the for-profits, make services available anytime. When it opens in Fall 2015, the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which will serve an expansive 60-mile-wide region, will offer students a holistic student lifecycle management and CRM and support system accessible across the region.
  • Even as these ten innovations gradually become part of the higher education ecosystem, several new educational models are appearing, which potentially challenge business as usual.
  • Model 1:  New Pathways to a Bachelors Degree
  • Early college/dual enrollment programs that grant high school students college credit.  Expanded access to Advanced Placement courses. Bachelor degree-granting community colleges. Three-year bachelors degree programs. All of these efforts to accelerate time to degree are gaining traction. Particularly disruptive is the way students now consume higher education, acquiring credits in a variety of ways from various providers, face-to-face and online.
  • Model 2:  The Bare-bones University
  • The University of North Texas’s Dallas campus, designed with the assistance of Bain & Company, the corporate management consulting  firm, has served as a prototype for a lower-cost option, with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring, hybrid and online courses (to minimize facilities’ costs), and a limited number of majors tied to local workforce needs. 
  • Model 3:  Experimental Models
  • Minerva Project, seek to reinvent the university experience by combining a low residency model, real-world work experience through internships, and significantly reduced degree costs through scaled online learning
  • the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, and other online-only institutions have created physical locations and even MOOC providers stress the importance of learner MeetUps and are focused on implementing hybrid courses on traditional campuses.
  • While some corporations partner with academic institutions (GM, for example, offers a MBA through Indiana University), the number of stand-alone corporate universities now exceeds 4,200
  • Model 4:  Corporate Universities
  • Although these corporate units do not offer degrees, they may well pose a threat to traditional universities in two ways.  First, by their very existence, the corporate universities infer that existing undergraduate institutions fail to prepare their graduates for the workplace. Second, these entities may well displace enrollment in existing graduate and continuing education programs.
  • Model 5: All of the Above
  • The irony may be that all the so-called disruption will actually bring higher education back to its core mission. In the words of the public intellectual du jour, William Deresiewicz, “My ultimate hope is that [college] becomes recognized as a right of citizenship, and that we make sure that that right is available to all.”
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 07 Oct 14
     
    "With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as "disruptive innovation" have abated.  No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation."
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