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Sasha Thackaberry

Competency-based education gets a boost from the Education Department @insidehighered - 0 views

  • On Tuesday the department announced a new round of its “experimental sites” initiative, which waives certain rules for federal aid programs so institutions can test new approaches without losing their aid eligibility. Many colleges may ramp up their experiments with competency-based programs -- and sources said more than 350 institutions currently offer or are seeking to create such degree tracks.
  • the federal program could help lay the groundwork for regulation and legislation that is better-suited to competency-based learning.
  • Supporters of competency-based education called the experimental sites announcement a big win.
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  • “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.
  • Clearing the Way
  • 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 department said it is seeking experiments in four areas. They should increase academic quality and reduce costs, the feds have said. And the announcement said the department would conduct evaluations of the selected programs, to test their effectiveness
  • 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.
  • “We don't have to wait for a reauthorization,” she said. “We can inform a reauthorization.”
Sasha Thackaberry

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

  • 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.
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    "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

Lumina-funded group seeks to lead conversation on competency-based education @insidehig... - 0 views

  • Competency-based education appears to be higher education’s "next big thing." Yet many academics aren’t sure what it is. And that goes double for lawmakers and journalists.
  • A new group is stepping in to try to clear up some of the confusion. The nascent Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) will include up to 20 institutions that offer competency-based degrees or are well on their way to creating them.
  • A new group is stepping in to try to clear up some of the confusion. The nascent Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) will include up to 20 institutions that offer competency-based degrees or are well on their way to creating them. The Lumina Foundation is funding the three-year effort. Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization, is coordinating the work.
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  • The reason for the project’s creation, said several officials who are working on it, is a growing need for shared guiding principles. Interest in online education is high, and many college leaders want competency-based education to avoid the hype, misconceptions and resulting backlash massive open online courses have received.
  • A separate Lumina grant will help pay for a website that will make public much of the network’s work and research. Southern New Hampshire University is responsible for creating the website.
  • That project is an "incubator" that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding through its Next Generation Learning Challenges grant, which is managed by Educause. To participate, colleges will need to submit a plan to begin creating a competency-based program by January 2015, according to a draft document about the grant.
  • Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, welcomed the deepening conversation over competency-based education. She said she hopes the network can provide some clarity on the emerging delivery model, which the association has viewed warily. The competency-based movement does have promise, she said. Ideally, Schneider said, competency-based programs share goals with the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP), a Lumina-funded effort that attempts to define what degree holders should know and be able to do. Schneider helped author the profile.
anonymous

Exploring the Impact of the Amazon Effect on Higher Education | The EvoLLLution - 1 views

  • The “Amazon effect”
  • Even in businesses that are not direct competitors of Amazon, such as industrial conglomerates, aerospace companies and defense contractors, we regularly hear about changing customer expectations, shaped by the new realities of the consumer space, influencing requirements.
  • While commercial businesses are clearly experiencing the changes brought about by the “Amazon effect,” there are many other sectors of the economy that are being impacted as well. For instance, higher education is beginning to reevaluate its own value propositions and business models in light of changing customer expectations, new budgetary realities and the explosion in online learning.
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  • what is more intriguing is the rationale for this growth. Is it an attempt to expand institutional reach and better meet customer needs, especially those of students, parents and employers, or is it simply a means to fill budgetary gaps?
  • In the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, we have taken a very customer-oriented approach to online learning and have put customer needs, as well as the overall student experience and learning outcomes, at the forefront of our online development efforts.
  • the need to remain an agile learning organization remains paramount. In spite of what some believe, higher education is not a “field of dreams.” If you build it, there is no guarantee that students will come.
  • First, organizations must understand the needs and requirements of their customers at a level of intimacy well beyond what has been typical in the past. Second, organizations must understand which customers they should serve and then segment these customers to better align resources and value propositions (i.e., one size does not fit all). Third, organizations must remain open to new business models as a way to sustain growth and opportunities over time.
  • Can you provide different degree or certificate offerings for different customer groups and how do you effectively manage these different offerings?
  • Is your institution open to alternative business models, not to replace the primary one, but to supplement and enhance the overall portfolio?
  • In the past, the inclination would be to create a generic program that would serve the needs of many different individuals; however, the risk is that such a program might not address the full set of needs for any one individual.
  • As a result, we need to become much more flexible and agile in defining requirements and how best to meet those requirements. Competency-based learning, micro-learning, MOOCs and any number of other emerging approaches must be considered in this “solution” context. Flexible, online learning is an important part of the solutions mix, too.
  • While it is impossible to accurately predict what might happen if higher education is unable to adjust to these new realities, the experience from business suggests that the result could be dramatic. The Fortune 500 of today looks dramatically different than the Fortune 500 of even 20 years ago. Bankruptcies, consolidations and new technologies continue to transform the commercial marketplace. It would be foolish to think that something similar couldn’t happen in higher education, too. The challenges are significant, but the opportunities for those who can embrace these new realities could be equally significant and exciting!
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.
Garry Golden

Meet Deep Dive, the New York Times' experimental context engine and story exp... - 1 views

  •  
    he of metadata from stories to go, as the name suggests, deeper into a news event by pulling together related articles. So instead of performing a search yourself
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.
anonymous

Technological Advances Demand Adaptation from Public Higher Education | The EvoLLLution - 0 views

  • While MOOCS are hardly a step forward pedagogically, they have brought distance learning out of the shadows and into daily discourse about the future of higher education.
  • The lines between for-profit and not-for-profit are blurring as partnerships evolve between community colleges offering two-year diplomas and for-profit colleges awarding the bachelor’s degree. For-profit corporations now provide the platform and technical know-how for expanding the reach of not-for-profit master’s programs at many major universities.
  • Educational technologies will need to be employed for building new models of learning
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  • Creative ways of reaching new student audiences — those of all ages, background and locales — will expand the institutional footprint in exciting new ways. No future academic enterprise will be blessed with guaranteed support and students. All will be vulnerable. But the net result, through collective leadership, can take us into a new era of higher learning.
Sasha Thackaberry

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

  • 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.”
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    "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."
anonymous

Ellucian's Acquisition and the New LMS Wars | EdSurge News - 2 views

  • If you want to get drunk, go to a higher education conference and take a shot every time someone says competency-based education (CBE). It is one of the most discussed concepts in the industry today, but what is more impressive is that CBE isn't just the buzzword du jour in “edtech” circles. This drinking game would get you drunk in education policy, instructional design, and even accreditation conferences.
anonymous

How should quality assurance for competency-based ed work? - Page 2 of 2 - eCampus News... - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Although online, competency-based programs have been around for some time, opening up federal funding at scale across the higher education system for lots of new players has never been done before. As the government gets into this game, harnessing, and not limiting, the potential that competency-based learning brings—to be fundamentally about a student’s learning—as it seeks to assure quality is critical. The nation has yet to master that.
Sasha Thackaberry

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

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    Lumina's creating a new system of credentials. Are degrees at risk? Will microcredentialing and digital badges stick?
Sasha Thackaberry

International Impact of MOOCs Still Up in the Air - US News - 0 views

  • While the number of students taking MOOCs has exploded in the past few years, experts are divided on what impact the courses have had on international education opportunities.
  • Advocates and creators of massive open online courses – the free courses open to anyone with an Internet connection – have high hopes for how the classes can help those hungry for a U.S.-style education. 
  • "Over time people began to feel that the excitement was really just hype."
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  • Most MOOC participants already have degrees and live in developed countries. ​"These online classes aren't really reaching the poor," Wildavsky says. "They aren't reaching the uneducated.
  • "Courses requiring extremely specialized or expert knowledge grant people access to ideas and concepts that they might not ever encounter otherwise," Curtis Bonk, an ​education professor at Indiana University, said via email. "With such new learning opportunities, one’s sense of self or identity as a learner is enhanced.
  • "It's easy to deflate the over-the-top rhetoric that has characterized the advent of MOOCs," ​ Wildavsky wrote in a recent article. "But the developing world has much to gain from this new educational era."
anonymous

An "All You Can Eat" College Degree Could Be The Future Of Higher Education | Co.Exist ... - 0 views

  • The model is fundamentally different, however, than any other adult bachelor programs that you’ve heard of. Students will pay a flat subscription fee of $2,250 for three month’s of “all you can eat” access. During that time. they’ll be able to use the school’s instructional content online, its advisors, and other resources. More importantly, they’ll be welcome to try to pass as many “competency tests” as they want.
  • “We are in essence creating a virtual university--a new one,” says Ray Cross, Chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “What is a full-time student in a self-paced competency-based model? Well, we’ve got to define that.”
  • Only 10 students will be accepted for each degree program in January 2014, but as the program expands, Cross says the “sky is the limit,” especially given how many students are open to self-taught online courses around the world.
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  • The Lumina Foundation just awarded the university a $1.25 million grant to evaluate the program and document its creation so that it can be replicated at other schools.
  • For public universities, new ways of thinking about fundamental business models are becoming a necessity. “Our reliance on state funding is shrinking, and that’s true in every state that I'm aware of,” says Cross. “But it’s increasingly difficult for students to afford higher education costs at all levels. That is not a sustainable trend. It just is not. We need to seek alternatives.”
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    Description of Wisconsin's "Flex Degrees."  Pay $2,250 for three months and learn and test as much as you want.
Sasha Thackaberry

Feds mull experiment on aid and accreditation for alternative providers | InsideHigherEd - 0 views

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    More news about federal aid for alternative credentials.
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