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Sasha Thackaberry

Competency-based online program at Kentucky's community colleges @insidehighered - 0 views

  • Sometimes potentially “disruptive” approaches to higher education arrive on campuses with little fanfare. And they can become solid additions to traditional colleges rather than an existential threat. Take Kentucky’s two-year college system, which three years ago began an online offering aimed at working adults. The project, dubbed “Learn on Demand,” hits most of the buzzwords du jour, featuring modular courses that lead to stackable credentials, with both self-paced and competency-based elements. All that’s missing is a MOOC.
  • Roughly 1,000 students are enrolled in Learn on Demand at any one time, according to officials at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Many heard about it by word of mouth, and a growing number of the system’s 33,000 online students have been attracted to the convenience of the classes, which can be broken into modules that take as little as three weeks to complete.
  • On-campus students have also begun “plugging their schedules” with the courses, says Jay Box, the system’s chancellor.
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  • “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.”
  • The program offers full, 15-week courses as well as ones that are broken into three or more “bite sized” pieces. Faculty course developers “determine the most logical competencies or learning outcomes to group together in a module,” Box says. Some of those modules come with a credit hour. Some don’t, and offer fractional credit. But all of them build toward a certificate or associate degree, including ones in business administration, information technology and nursing.
  • 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.
  • The project also attempts to make remedial education more efficient.
  • The project, however, includes a college readiness course which enables a student to test out of individual modules -- breaking down their remedial requirements into small pieces. “A typical developmental education student who might test into the highest level of developmental math and would normally have to take a 16-week long course to get the credit for the course,” Box said via e-mail, “might only have to be enrolled through Learn on Demand in one three-week module.”
  • 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.
  • For example, the University of Wisconsin System and Northern Arizona University this year announced new degree programs with heavy competency elements. And Western Governors, a nonprofit, online institution that offers bachelor's and graduate degrees, keeps expanding.
Jay Collier

EdX Quietly Developing 'MicroBachelors' Program - EdSurge News - 0 views

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    "Education in five to ten years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong," Agarwal said at the meeting, later explaining that omnichannel meant offering courses either online or in person. "We are going to make it so. It's not going to happen by itself, we're going to make it happen. Modular is good because it can create new efficiencies and new scaling and unbundling of components," he added.
Sasha Thackaberry

Dev Bootcamp - The Original Coding Bootcamp - 0 views

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    Site for modular online training in coding.
anonymous

Hire educationMastery, modularization, and the workforce revolution | Christensen Insti... - 1 views

  • 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.
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    Great short piece on CBE and its potential to change higher education.  Introduces a "mini-book' on the subject.
anonymous

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

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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,”
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