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anonymous

Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education | EDUCAUSE - 2 views

er.educause.edu/...unbundling-of-higher-education

CBE educause competency-based degree

shared by anonymous on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • the "4 Rs" that have emerged as the dominant metrics in higher education: Rankings Research Real Estate Rah! (Sports)
  • as Purdue University President Mitch Daniels has said: "Higher education has to get past the 'take our word for it' era. Increasingly, people aren't."2
  • the market is no longer viewing the 4 Rs as proxies of excellence.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • among 27 potential factors, the U.S. News ranking came in at #20 in terms of importance in students' decision-making process. Twice as many students said that rankings were "not important at all" as those who said that they were "very important." So what do students care about? The top four factors were majors, cost, safety, and employment.3
  • We are beginning to see a similar shakeout in higher education. In a survey of 368 small private colleges and midsize state universities, 38 percent failed to meet their 2014–15 budget for both freshman enrollment and net tuition revenue.
  • If they can truly provide premium programs with a high return on investment, they will be able
  • to continue to charge high tuition. What they must not do—if they want to survive—is stand still.
  • Forced to demonstrate definitive value, midtier institutions will have to decide what they want to be when they grow up. If they're in the business of providing basic degree programs—where value to the student accrues primarily as a result of the credential itself—they will become a discount provider: delivering the program as inexpensively as possible.
  • "a full stack education company might not look like a school at all. It could look like an employer, a lender, a school, and/or a recruiter all rolled into one."6
  • The good news for students is that following this hollowing out, institutions will provide a higher return on investment.
  • premium providers will utilize technology for some delivery but will focus on immersive, intensive, employer-focused and -facing experiences for students
  • In fact, it's conceivable that the only remaining institutions with a return-on-investment profile characteristic of today's market will be the elite colleges and universities that have set the pace for higher education until now.
  • Full-stack providers that hope to achieve the higher education equivalent of Apple's or Uber's success will have to find a way to do three fundamental things: (1) develop and deliver specific high-quality educational experiences that produce graduates with capabilities that specific employers desperately want; (2) work with students to solve financing problems; and (3) connect students with employers during and following the educational experience and make sure students get a job.
  • In a decade, online education may be recognized not for making higher education accessible to anyone with a smartphone but, rather, for serving as the midwife who delivered competency-based learning into the world. Although competency-based learning is theoretically possible in a non-technology-enabled environment, it's not nearly as simple and appealing. In a competency-based environment, transfer credits become an anachronism and failure becomes a relic. In a competency-based world, the 41 percent of students who start but don't complete degree programs within six years will still receive value from the competencies they can show to prospective employers.15 Equally important, in our experience, competency-based learning reduces the cost of delivery by half over standard online delivery. Astute providers will pass the savings along to students and become leaders in the new discounter segment.
  • Some coding bootcamps even guarantee employment or tuition is refunded
  • the real higher education story of the decade is the crisis of affordability
  • The average bachelor's degree recipient who has taken out student loans carries $28,400 in debt, and 26 million consumers have two or more open student loans on their credit report.
  • Between 1999 and 2011, outstanding student loan debt grew by 511 percent; as of early 2014, it exceeded $1 trillion, more than credit card debt.10
  • In 1979, a typical student could pay his/her way through college working at the minimum wage for 182 hours, the equivalent of a part-time summer job. In 2013, the same student at the same college at the present-day minimum wage would have to work over 991 hours (a full-time job for half the year) just to cover tuition while still needing to find additional resources to pay for living expenses.11 In addition, the wealth gap between young and old has also never been wider. At the end of 2011, the typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older had a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, a number that more than doubled since 2005
  • in our current isomorphic system price continues to serve as a signal of quality
  • As a result, most institutions offering online programs have done so at the same price point as their on-ground programs; to do otherwise would send the wrong signal for a medium that is still young and thirsting for academic legitimacy.
  • If any product or service should be designed so that a stoned freshman can figure it out, it should be higher education.
  • Despite this, higher education may be the most complex product or service purportedly designed for mass consumption. This is not a comment on the difficulty of the subject matter being taught in the classroom; rather, it is a comment on the opaque and complex process of enrolling, financing, and ultimately assembling a degree. Focus groups conducted at Macomb Community College in Michigan, offering 200 degree and certificate programs to 48,000 students, revealed that very few students were able to navigate the complexities of enrollment, financial aid, transcript requests, prior credit recognition, program selection, and course selection/scheduling.
  • Because of the flawed transfer-credit system, students have difficulty identifying pathways toward a degree if they're changing institutions—something that a large percentage of them will do over the course of their studies.
  • To be successful in improving outcomes, higher education must turn the current process of program design on its head. Traditional program design is based on a system of credit hour inputs rather than outcomes. This has resulted from a culture of faculty-focused curricular development, which moves from an established curriculum to assessment and then to learning outcomes. A simpler, better system would be reverse-engineered by starting with student outcomes, then moving to the assessments that prove that the outcomes have been achieved, and only then turning to the question of what curricula best prepare students for the assessments. Fortunately, technology allows higher education to make this shift.
  • Even more shocking, approximately half of institutions that claimed to hit budget were reporting against downward-revised budget numbers.5
  • Technology's efficacy goal for online learning should be to move "focus by choice" as far as possible in the direction of "controlled focus." Two sets of technologies will accomplish this.
  • Combining adaptive learning with competency-based learning is the "killer app" of online education. Students will progress at their own pace. When they excel on formative assessments integrated into the curricula, they are served up more-challenging learning objects. And when students struggle, adaptive systems throttle back until the student is ready for more.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 15
       
      I disagree that Gamification is that important.  If we make everything they learn relevant and design learning sessions for success, fooling students into thinking they are playing games will not be needed.  Learning something relevant, is one of life's basic pleasures.
  • The second technology is gamification
  • believing that the solution to the smartphone challenge is simply allowing mobile access to the same online course is tantamount to believing that an institution's online strategy is effectively addressed by putting lectures on YouTube or iTunes.
  • In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year.
  • Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they're about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?
  • neither dot-com entrepreneurs nor MOOCs have produced courseware that is truly disruptive to higher education.
  • What if that is because the software that will disrupt higher education isn't courseware at all? What if the software is, instead, an online marketplace? Uber (market cap $40 billion) owns no vehicles. Airbnb (market cap $10 billion) owns no hotel rooms. What they do have are marketplaces with consumer-friendly interfaces. By positioning their interfaces between millions of consumers and sophisticated supply systems, Uber and Airbnb have significantly changed consumer behavior and disrupted these supply systems. Is there a similar marketplace in the higher education arena? There is, and it has 40 million college students and recent graduates on its platform. It is called LinkedIn.
  • LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has been very clear about his ambition, stating in November 2014: We want to have a profile for every member of the global work force, all 3 billion-plus people. We want to have a profile for every company in the world—that's north of 70 million companies—and digital representation of every job in the world. We also want digital representation of every skill required to obtain those jobs, a digital presence for every university in the world, and we want to make it easy for every individual company and university to share their professionally relevant knowledge. In doing all of this, we hope to allow all forms of capital to flow to where it can best be leveraged to lift and transform the global economy.2
  • Competency marketplaces will profile the competencies (or capabilities) of students and job seekers, allow them to identify the requirements of employers, evaluate the gap, and follow the educational path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost-effectively.
  • It could be the "software" that Andreessen foretold and that colleges and universities have long feared.
  • As competency marketplaces and their associated algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, employers and students will begin to value the signals from these tools more than the signals from nonelite universities' bundled degrees. (The signals from elite universities' bundled degrees will remain strong, largely due to the high caliber of the inputs.) As employees who are matched on the basis of competencies (and then hired through standard interviewing techniques for behavioral and cultural fit) excel in the workplace, this trend will only be reinforced. Employers will adjust job descriptions to reflect the incoming competencies of high-performing candidates, and competency matches will get better and better.
  • At some point, a student will walk into the college admissions office and say: "I've read your programs of study, and your Environmental Engineering program looks interesting. But how will it help me take my competency profile from where it is today to where LinkedIn says it needs to be in order to get an entry-level job as an engineer?" Colleges and universities that offer competency-based programs will at least speak the same language as this student. That's necessary, but not sufficient. A sufficient response will require unbundling the degree.
  • Likewise, colleges and universities may soon transition from the bloated degree model to an "Education-as-a-Service" (EaaS) model. Successful providers will sell students what they need when they need it: a "just-in-time" educational model that is much closer to today's coding schools than current degree programs.
  • Each of these is a potential revenue stream for competency marketplaces, either from the employer or from the education provider.
  • If ownership is held by the competency marketplace, we may find ourselves in a world where there's more money to be made from owning the competency profile than from delivering postsecondary education.
  • To avoid marginalization, colleges and universities need to insist that individuals own their competencies. Ensuring that ownership lies with the individual could make the competency profile portable and could facilitate movement across marketplaces, as well as to higher education institutions. In an era of unbundling, when colleges and universities need to move from selling degrees to selling EaaS subscriptions, the winners will be those that can turn their students into "students for life"—providing the right educational programs and experiences at the right time. This becomes possible when individuals own their competencies and allow institutions to manage their profiles, suggesting educational programs and even employment.
  • In the coming years, many institutions will succumb to the current inertia that is too prevalent in higher education. Some institutions will address some of these issues and will survive. Others will successfully address most of these issues and will then need to prepare for the next seismic change in higher education: The Great Unbundling.
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.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • 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."
anonymous

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Co... - 1 views

www.fastcompany.com/...y-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb

MOOC udacity online education moocs

shared by anonymous on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Higher education is an enormous business in the United States--we spend approximately $400 billion annually on universities, a figure greater than the revenues of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter combined
  • The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype.
  • If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • "I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial,"
  • And yet, all of these efforts have been hampered by the same basic problem: Very few people seem to finish courses when they're not sitting in a lecture hall.
  • "Sebastian is like the smartest guy you've ever met, but on speed,"
  • His trip in March of 2011 to the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, where he delivered a talk about his work, led to an unexpected change in his plans. Thrun movingly recounted how a high school friend had been killed in a car accident, the result of the kind of human error that self-driving cars would eliminate. Although he was well received, Thrun was upstaged by a young former hedge-fund analyst named Sal Khan, who spoke of using cheaply produced, wildly popular web videos to tutor millions of high school students on the Internet. Thrun's competitive streak kicked in. "I was a fully tenured Stanford professor . . . and here's this guy who teaches millions," he would later recount. "It was embarrassing." Though Thrun insists the timing was coincidental, just a few weeks later, he informed Stanford that he would be giving up tenure and joining Google full time as a VP. (He did continue teaching and is still a faculty member.)
  • "I can't teach at Stanford again," he said definitively. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill. And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your students. But I've taken the red pill. I've seen Wonderland."
  • It's hard to imagine a story that more thoroughly flatters the current sensibilities of Silicon Valley than the one into which Thrun stumbled. Not only is reinventing the university a worthy goal--tuition prices at both public and private colleges have soared in recent years, and the debt burden borne by American students is more than $1 trillion--but it's hard to imagine an industry more ripe for disruption than one in which the professionals literally still don medieval robes. "Education hasn't changed for 1,000 years," says Peter Levine, a partner with Andreessen Horowitz and a Udacity board member, summing up the Valley's conventional wisdom on the topic. "Udacity just seemed like a fundamentally new way to change how communities of people are educated."
  • Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one's own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video. Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn't arguing that Udacity's current courses would replace a traditional education--only that it would augment it. "We're not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you," he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. "The medium will change," he says.
  • "The sort of simplistic suggestion that MOOCs are going to disrupt the entire education system is very premature," he says.
  • "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product," Thrun tells me. "It was a painful moment." Turns out he doesn't even like the term MOOC.
  • "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.
  • At a press conference the following January, Brown and Thrun announced that Udacity would open enrollment in three subjects--remedial math, college algebra, and elementary statistics--and they would count toward credit at San Jose State University, a 30,000-student public college. Courses were offered for just $150 each, and students were drawn from a lower-income high school and the underperforming ranks of SJSU's student body. "A lot of these failures are avoidable," Thrun said at the press conference. "I would love to set these students up for success, not for failure."
  • Viewed within this frame, the results were disastrous. Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class, making the $150 price tag--roughly one-third the normal in-state tuition--seem like something less than a bargain. The one bright spot: Completion rates shot through the roof; 86% of students made it all the way through the classes, better than eight times Udacity's old rate.
  • "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit."
  • Udacity won't disclose how much it is making, but Levine of Andreessen Horowitz says he's pleased. "The attitude from the beginning, about how we'd make money, was, 'We'll figure it out,'" he says. "Well, we figured it out." Thrun, ever a master of academic branding, terms this sponsored-course model the Open Education Alliance and says it is both the future of Udacity and, more generally, college education. "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"
  • Thrun initially approached the problem of low completion rates as one that he could solve single-handedly. "I was looking at the data, and I decided I would make a really good class," he recalls.
  • This January, several hundred computer science students around the world will begin taking classes for an online master's degree program being jointly offered by Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Fees will be substantial--$6,600 for the equivalent of a three-semester course of study--but still less than one-third of what an in-state student would pay at Georgia Tech, and one-seventh of the tuition charged to an out-of-state one.
  • Georgia Tech professors will teach the courses and handle admissions and accreditation, and students will get a Georgia Tech diploma when they're done, but Udacity will host the course material. Thrun expects the partnership to generate $1.3 million by the end of its first year. The sum will be divided 60-40 between the university and Udacity, respectively, giving the startup its single largest revenue source to date.
  • Crucially, the program won't ultimately cost either Udacity or Georgia Tech anything. Expenses are being covered by AT&T, which put up $2 million in seed capital in the hope of getting access to a new pool of well-trained engineers.
  • "There's a recruiting angle for us, but there's also a training angle," says Scott Smith, an SVP of human resources at the telco. Though Smith says the grant to Georgia Tech came with no strings attached, AT&T plans to send a large group of its employees through the program and is in talks with Udacity to sponsor additional courses as well. "That's the great thing about this model," Smith says. "Sebastian is reaching out to us and saying, 'Help us build this--and, oh, by the way, the payoff is you get instruction for your employees.'" Says Zachary, "The Georgia Tech deal isn't really a Georgia Tech deal. It's an AT&T deal."
  • anonymous on 12 Dec 13
     
    Great insights into Sebastian Thrun, and MOOCs -- especially the "sponsored MOOC." 
anonymous

EBSCOhost: The trouble with competence - 0 views

web.ebscohost.com/...detail

competence PLA Badging

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Wood & Power go on to say that a successful conceptualisation of competence would show "how specific competencies are integrated at a higher level and would also accommodate changing patterns of salience among these skills and abilities at different ages and in different contexts" (pp. 414-415). These authors emphasise the importance of a developmental approach to competence that is not fixated by operational definitions such that what we can measure is taken to be what develops.
  • Typically competencies are described in terms of observable behaviour and explicit criteria. Like its forerunner behavioural objectives, the language of competence invites a spurious precision and elaboration in the definition of good or effective practice. The specification of competence is assessment led in that it is usually associated with a statement which defines performance criteria and expected levels of performance. Like the objectives model, competency-based approaches to professional education and training attempt to improve educational practice by increasing clarity about ends.
  • Such models can be highly reductive, providing atomised lists of tasks and functions, or they can be highly generalised, offering descriptions of motivational dispositions or cognitive abilities such as problem-solving. In the case of the former the sum of the parts rarely if ever represents the totality of good practice; paradoxically the role is under-determined by the specification. In the case of the latter it is difficult if not impossible to provide an operational account of a disposition or ability that does not rest solely on situational judgement. A more significant feature of models of competence is that in their tidiness and precision, far from preserving the essential features of expertise, they distort and understate the very things they are trying to represent.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Glass (1977) identifies six techniques for determining the criterion score or point in criterion-referenced assessment: (i) the performance of others, (ii) counting backwards from 100%, (iii) bootstrapping on other criterion scores, (iv) judging minimal competence, (v) decision-theoretic approaches, (vi) operations research methods [ 3]. He argues that educational movements in the USA like accountability, mastery learning, competency-based education and the like rest on the common notion that a minimal acceptable level of performance on a task can be specified.
  • To put it bluntly there is a massive mismatch between the appealing language of precision that surrounds competency or performance-based programmes and the imprecise, approximate and often arbitrary character of testing when applied to human capabilities.
  • If competence is about what people can do then at first sight it appears to circumvent the issue of what people need to know-it shifts the balance of power firmly in the direction of practice and away from theory. It focuses attention on questions of relevance: knowledge for what purpose? By making education and training more practical, by emphasising what a person can do rather than what they know, competency-based approaches supposedly make access more open.
  • What is needed are standards of criticism and principles of professional judgement that can inform action in the context of uncertainty and change.
  • actions cannot in themselves be seen as competent. Rather, competence is to be located in the accounts used to license or warrant actions. In this analysis the mark of a competent practitioner, in this instance police officers, is one who can choose the right account for the right audience. The approach recognises that what is good practice cannot be defined simply by reference to the function of the organisation or its aims and objectives. There are, Fielding would argue, a plurality of audiences who may or may not judge competence in similar ways.
  • locates the definition of competence firmly within the interaction between values and situational decision-making
  • there is nothing new about competency-based approaches to education and training
  • Cambridge Journal of Education. Nov91, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p331. 11
Sasha Thackaberry

Reclaiming Innovation Can we reclaim innovation? - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...default.html

innovation learning education teaching technology gaming lms company data

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • what's not to like about innovation?
  • Yet as 2014 churns on, the glow is wearing off. Today, innovation is increasingly conflated with hype, disruption for disruption's sake, and outsourcing laced with a dose of austerity-driven downsizing. Call it innovation fatigue.
  • Audrey Watters has noted the essentially apocalyptic flavor of what she describes as "the myth and the millennialism of disruptive innovation" — mythic in the sense that it prophesies "the destruction of the old and the ascension of the new" and constitutes a narrative that "has been widely accepted as unassailably true." When applied to education, disruptive innovation promises nothing less than "the end of school as we know it."
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Systems.
  • But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.
  • Silos.
  • 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").
  • Missed Opportunities.
  • 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
  • Costs.
  • 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.
  • The myriad costs associated with supporting LMSs crowd out budget and staff time that might be directed toward homegrown, open-source, and user-driven innovation.
  • Confidence.
  • 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?"
  • Can We Reclaim Innovation?
  • , 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.
  • These courses and systems are also distracting colleges and universities from the conversation that we should have been having since the late 1990s: how can we leverage open platforms and open access to augment our teaching and learning mission?13 Open-source, searchable, syndicated, and collaborative authoring systems can provide numerous efficiencies, such as publishing to multiple environments and ensuring interoperability and long-term digital preservation.
  • 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
Sasha Thackaberry

What Degrees Should Mean @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/..._should_know_and_be_able_to_do

online program elearning competency-based federal financial aid

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more). The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.
  • Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14
     
    What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more). The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.
Xavier Moya

Assajos sobre educació oberta I - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Essays

open p2p education lectures papers

shared by Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    1 Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community 2 Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design 3 Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy 4 Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks 5 Richard Barbrook on the 'High-tech Gift Economy' 6 Yochai Benkler on Peer Production 7 James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement 8 Vasilis Kostakis: At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm 9 George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept 10 Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain 11 Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology 12 Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing 13 Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production 14 Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food 15 Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class. 16 Massimo De Angelis on a political strategy to unite commons and political/social movements 17 Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest 18 Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy 19 Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology 20 Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common 21 Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance 22 Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons 23 Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century 24 John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality 25 Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere 26 Vasilis_Kostakis et al. on Peer Production and Desktop Manufacturing 27 Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism 28 Ugo Mattei: The State, the Market, an
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    29 influential papers on Open Education collected by P2P Foundation
anonymous

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

evolllution.com/...zon-effect-on-higher-education

Amazon effect Designing Learning higher education

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 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!
anonymous

Ownership and Agency Will Propel STEM Learning | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...el-stem-learning-matt-levinson

shared by anonymous on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • anonymous on 09 Jan 14
     
    Great article that advocated for "Learner Agency" - models of education that give learners more control.
Victorious Kidss Educares Pune

SCHOOL OF TOMORROW HERE NOW : Victorious Kidss Educares - 0 views

www.victoriouskidsseducares.org/...school-of-tomorrow-here-now

school in pune international school in pune

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  • Victorious Kidss Educares Pune on 08 Jun 16
     
    Victorious kidss educares : IB school in Pune, has the vision of restarting a University of the fame of Nalanda and bringing India in the forefront in the field of Research & Education. This blog contains the information of education system in VKE where you get a guarantee that your child will excel and will be brilliant, irrespective of the background and earlier education. Visit http://www.victoriouskidsseducares.org/blogs/school-of-tomorrow-here-now/
Sasha Thackaberry

7 competency-based higher ed programs to keep an eye on | Education Dive - 0 views

www.educationdive.com/...328382

higher higher ed programs keep eye competency-based competency

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 04 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • ompetency-based education, also known as direct assessment learning, is a sometimes-controversial model that has gained ground in recent months.
  • Advocates say competency-based ed puts the focus on students’ capabilities rather than how many hours per week they spend in the classroom. The benefit for employers, they say, is that prospective employees can be judged more easily, based on their demonstrated competencies rather than guessing how their grades will translate to real-world work. By
  • In September, an audit by the department’s Office of Inspector General found that the department was not adequately addressing the risks posed by competency-based/direct assessment programs, increasing the likelihood that schools would create programs that didn’t meet criteria to receive Title IV federal financial aid.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • One risk, according to the auditor, was that colleges and universities would create programs that were just correspondence courses, without any meaningful interaction between students and faculty. Another risk was that students might receive Title IV federal funding for their life experience, without using the school’s learning resources.
  • The University of Michigan
  • the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, had approved the school’s first competency-based degree program: a master's of health professions. The distance learning program is aimed at working professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and social work.
  • The program doesn’t have traditional campus-based classes — its students interact with mentors by phone, email, video chat, or, for students and mentors near each other, in person.
  • The University of Wisconsin System
  • The Flexible Option program at University of Wisconsin System offers five competency-based online certificates and degrees, targeting adult students with college credits but no degrees.
  • Wisconsin won approval from the Education Department and an accreditor for its self-paced, direct assessment arts and sciences associate’s degree.
  • Purdue University
  • The program is “transdisciplinary” — open to students in any discipline — with a theme-based organization and learning driven by problem-solving instead of how much time is spent in the classroom.
  • students receive credit based on learned and demonstrated competencies.
  • Western Governors University
  • Western charges a flat-rate tuition for every six months of enrollment, and students’ advancement is based on what they can prove they know
  • The 2-year-old program has partnered with 55 employers to create programs for job-specific skills. College for America claims to be the only program of its kind to be approved by a regional accrediting agency and by the Department of Education for Title IV federal financial aid, although the Education Department says there is one other.
  • Southern New Hampshire University
  • Capella University
  • The university allows students to receive credit for knowledge already gained through their experience with a “prior learning assessment.” As of Jan. 23, Capella and Southern New Hampshire had the only two programs approved by the Department of Education to receive Title IV financial aid, according to the department.
  • Northern Arizona University
  • Northern Arizona University offers a competency-based online learning program, called Personalized Learning, that allows students to use their previous experience to pass pretests and opt out of certain lessons.
  • is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
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
  • Highlight
  • Highlight
  • 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.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • 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

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

www.insidehighered.com/...ets-boost-education-department

education department gets competency-based financial aid

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • “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.”
anonymous

Navigating the CBE Frontier: At the Educational Crossroads | The EvoLLLution - 2 views

evolllution.com/...-at-the-educational-crossroads

CBE Competency-based FutureofEducation

shared by anonymous on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • First, the need for citizens with postsecondary education could not be higher. From the White House to the Lumina Foundation, national calls are for 60 percent of the U.S. population to have a postsecondary degree by the year 2025. Currently, just 41 percent of the population has such a degree. This means we need to increase the number of graduates by about 20 percent, or almost 64 million more U.S. citizens, in the next ten years. Given that about 18 million people in the entire U.S. are seeking any kind of post-secondary education now,and the average graduation rate is less than 50 percent in six years, we simply can’t “get there” for the U.S. population to reach 60 percent with college degrees in ten years if we don’t attract more students and expand the variety of educational models that we offer people.[2]
  • Second, most students seeking higher education, by far, are “non-traditional” “degree completers:” adults 25 years and older, with some college and no degree, working part or full time, often with family.[3] In my state of Wisconsin, recent census data indicate that 21 percent of our state (or over 800,000 adults) fits this description. Contrast that with the fact that Wisconsin only has about 60,000 college students who are “traditional” (18 to 24, attending full time, and living in or around a university).[4]
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Does it really make sense to expect, even implicitly, that a person already engaged in work and family should step out of that life in order to participate in an institution-based learning community? Instead, shouldn’t we be asking how to provide educational experiences that foster collaborative learning, supporting growth and development, to people who are already fully engaged in their lives outside of an educational institution?
  • The question is not how to help an adult student engage in a university-designed learning community; it’s how institutions can help students incorporate quality educational experiences and opportunities into their existing lives.
  • Adult learners need multiple opportunities to earn degrees, including educational models that differ greatly from traditional college programs.[9] They need new models that are structured around the entire 12-month calendar, where one can start and stop without penalty, and quickly move forward when mastery over material is demonstrated. We need to make use of new technologies and the latest in the science of learning to allow students to integrate their education into existing lives and careers. In short, to educate the population that is currently not served well by our traditional institutions of higher education, we need new models and methods that allow education to fit the interests, motivations and lives of our adult learners, not ask them to fit their lives into an educational system geared to 18- to 24-year-old full-time students. This is the promise of CBE.
  • The best CBE programs will design competencies that articulate the skills and abilities needed by productive citizens, and evaluate mastery of those competencies through assessments that blend seamlessly into students work and family.
Xavier Moya

Assajos sobre educació oberta II - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Essays_2

open p2p education lectures papers

shared by Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    1 Cosma Orsi on The Political Economy of Solidarity 2 Bruno Perens on The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source 3 James Quilligan on a framework for Global Commons-based Governance 4 Alan Rayner: Attuning to Natural Energy Flows vs. Abstract Economic Rationality 5 Dirk Riehle on the Economics of Open Source Software 6 David Ronfeldt on the Evolution of Governance 7 Marshall Sahlins on The Original Affluent Society 8 Graham Seaman: Can peer production make washing machines? 9 Clay Shirky on the web as evolvable system 10 David Skrbina, the participatory worldview 11 Bruno Theret, on the tradition of 'civil socialism' 12 Evan Thompson, on the enactive theory of consciousness 13 Jeff Vail, The Problem of Growth: Hierarchy vs. the Rhizome 14 Kazys Varnelis on how network culture differs from postmodernism 15 Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance 16 Raoul Victor, on Free Software, the sharing culture, and Marxism
  • Xavier Moya on 16 Jan 14
     
    16 influential papers on Open Education collected by P2P Foundation
anonymous

Teaching Section of US Tech Plan 2016 - 2 views

tech.ed.gov/teaching

educational technology EdTech

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • They need continuous, just-in-time support that includes professional development, mentors, and informal collaborations.
  • roughly half say that lack of training is one of the biggest barriers to incorporating technology into their teaching.
  • Institutions responsible for pre-service and in-service professional development for educators should focus explicitly on ensuring all educators are capable of selecting, evaluating, and using appropriate technologies and resources to create experiences that advance student engagement and learning. They also should pay special care to make certain that educators understand the privacy and security concerns associated with technology.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • For many teacher preparation institutions, state offices of education, and school districts, the transition to technology-enabled preparation and professional development will entail rethinking instructional approaches and techniques, tools, and the skills and expertise of educators who teach in these programs.
  • Technology can empower educators to become co-learners with their students
  • Side-by-side, students and teachers can become engineers of collaboration, designers of learning experiences, leaders, guides, and catalysts of change.
  • form online professional learning communities.
  • Teacher User Groups
  • Rethinking Teacher Preparation
  • more than 100 direct mentions of technology expectations
  • every new teacher should be prepared to model how to select and use the most appropriate apps and tools to support learning and evaluate these tools against basic privacy and security standards.
  • This expertise does not come through the completion of one educational technology course separate from other methods courses but through the inclusion of experiences with educational technology in all courses modeled by the faculty in teacher preparation programs.
  • URI has found that participants experienced a dramatic increase in digital skills associated with implementing project-based learning with digital media and technology. Their understanding of digital literacy also shifted to focus more on inquiry, collaboration, and creativity.
  • Denver Public Schools Personalizes Professional Development
anonymous

Underserved and overburdened, transfer students face an uphill battle to earn their deg... - 0 views

hechingerreport.org/l-battle-to-earn-their-degrees

PLA prior_learning_assessment

shared by anonymous on 09 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • 37 percent of all students who began college in 2008 have transferred institutions at some point. Nearly half of transfer students transfer more than once.
  • At ASU, our university, nearly 13,500 transfer students enrolled in fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters, outnumbering first-time freshmen by more than 2,000. These transfer numbers are likely to explode in coming years, with profound consequences for students and universities alike.
  • Today, more than one-third of college students are 25 or older. Only 14 percent of college students are residential students, and 46 percent are part-time college students.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Serving transfer students better is one of the few ways to make a significant, positive impact on the cost of college and degree completion, without the need for new regulations. Every transfer student who has earned postsecondary credits must have a basic set of rights associated with turning those credits into a degree and that degree into opportunity. A bill of rights will help do just that.
  • students transferring to public institutions benefit from the highest rate of credit acceptance: 20 percent more than students transferring to private non-profit colleges and 52 percent more than students transferring to private for-profit colleges. It’s not clear what academic interests explain this disparity, especially among top public and private colleges.
  • we need a Transfer Student’s Bill of Rights that guarantees access to degree programs, sequences, and prerequisites guiding higher education to do a much better job in serving the nation’s transfer students.
  • That means ensuring all students understand what prior courses will transfer to their new institutions before choosing their next university.
  • It means having access to data from all colleges and universities about their track record accepting credit and the fine print.
  • Central to transfer students’ rights is an imperative that every higher education institution adopt an infrastructure for electronic student records exchange, so that credits can be discovered and processed in an efficient, effective and timely manner.
  • Few realize that in higher education today, we have the equivalent of thousands of local railroads, each with its own gauge track. Our independent, decentralized system of higher education has many strengths, but if we are to lead the world in degree attainment our colleges and universities must be equipped with the same institution-to-institution record exchange capabilities that sectors such as finance put in place years ago.
Sasha Thackaberry

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

www.insidehighered.com/...m-kentuckys-community-colleges

online program kentucky community colleges competency-based elearning

shared by Sasha Thackaberry on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “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.
Walco Solutions

plc training programs - 0 views

shared by Walco Solutions on 15 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Walco Solutions on 15 Jun 15
     
    A joint venture of Walrus Marine Engineering Co.Pvt.Ltd.(An ISO 9001-2008 Certified Company) and Solutions Institute of Engineering and Technology (a 10+ year old training centre in the field of engineering). The Walco Solutions Automation training division was conceived with the vision to train professionals to meet the challenges in the field of automation with the aid of apt training modules specifically programmed to deliver a broad perspective of the Engineering disciplines and tap the opportunities in the field. http://walcosolutions.com / +91 8129981111
anonymous

Are Universities Going the Way of Record Labels? - Martin Smith - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...374012

universities disruptive_innovations

shared by anonymous on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • This last decade of the music industry presages the coming decade of education. Choice is expanding at every level, from pre-k to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education, are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services. So what will the future of education look like?
  • The price of content will freefall over the next seven years.
  • Education will be personalized.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Jul 14
       
      This substantiates my prediction that learners will be "knowmads" roaming the content landscape and collecting what they want and need.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The supply of learning content will swell.
  • With learning content available on demand, students will increasingly be able to build degree programs from a wide variety of institutions offering particular courses.
  • Students are the big winners here.
  • Existing institutions with large endowments will become the record labels: platforms that invest in great talent.
  • And distribution platforms that curate content will do well, commanding both economies of scale and scope.
  • In education, a cohort of new entrepreneurs and existing institutions will greatly increase personal choice for all of us.
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