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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

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.
Gina Hall

MoMA Talks - SPECIAL LIVE STREAM EVENT Learning Environments... - 0 views

momatalks.tumblr.com/...am-event-learning-environments

moma learning environments CAMLF

shared by Gina Hall on 07 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gina Hall on 07 Nov 12
     
    The field of education is undergoing a revolution precipitated by not only the rapid growth of technologies that are reshaping access to information and resources, communication, and learning, but by the demands of an evolving global economy that requires collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. "What role should a museum play as a place of learning in the 21st century?" and "What unique value will museums add to the field?"
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
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

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!
eidesign

How To Personalize Corporate Training With Videos - EIDesign - 0 views

www.eidesign.net/corporate-training-with-videos

corporate training personalization personalized learning videobasedlearning video based learning

shared by eidesign on 28 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • eidesign on 28 Jun 19
     
    Today's learners are an impatient lot, and they want training that is personalized for them. In this article, I show you the value of a personalized learning plan, and how you can leverage on video-based learning to enhance this further.
anonymous

UW-Extension dean: Flexibility critical in serving nontraditional learners | Education ... - 2 views

www.educationdive.com/...416646

FutureofEducation cbe flexibility

shared by anonymous on 10 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • David Schejba
  • dean of continuing education, outreach and e-learning at the University of Wisconsin-Extension
  • his career has been driven by a desire to make education flexible, affordable and accessible for working adults, some of whom have degrees and are looking for new skills, some of whom have no prior postsecondary experience, but all of whom have real commitments outside of schooling
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Schejbal sees the difference as a great example of why competency-based education makes sense.
  • Traditional students may need the structured learning experience and all of the knowledge and information that comes from a standard, semester-based model because they don’t bring as much with them to the classroom. Older students, though, come to the classroom with experience from work, the military, self-study, or previous college. Schejbal says they need a more malleable learning experience that lets them demonstrate what they know, apply that knowledge to a program, and spend time learning only the additional information they need.
  • University Learning Store
  • These non-degree options are distinct from stackable credentials that Schejbal sees less value in, though he says the stackable credentials are fine if they’re within the realm of traditional credits.
  • Schejbal sees the value in both the traditional model for younger students and newer, alternative models for the “nontraditional” learner
  • But serving such a diverse student population — and doing it well — is complicated.
  • Schejbal says culture plays a major role in whether a college or university makes the effort to find a way. “Some institutions have both cultures and business models that are rooted in traditional higher education structures,” Schejbal said. “Those institutions have very little incentive to change.”
  • anonymous on 10 Apr 16
     
    Dean Schejbal's views on CBE and no-traditional learners
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
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

Normal 3.0 in Postsecondary Education: Gazing Into Higher Ed's Future | The EvoLLLution - 1 views

evolllution.com/...ation-gazing-higher-eds-future

higher ed Future

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Normal 3.0 means in-time, on-time delivery of education when the student wants/needs it, and where the student wants/needs it. Normal 3.0 means some aspect of online learning and self-study. Think YouTube versus textbook. Normal 3.0 means using technology to delivery and measure education. Normal 3.0 means the credential or degree may not be the ultimate goal, but that gaining specific skills to do the current job is the short-term goal. Long term, the job is always changing, therefore the skills to go with it are changing as well.
  • Think certification versus certificate
  • Educational technology is the cornerstone to this, a fabulous opportunity and a contextual nightmare.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • PSE can’t afford to try to expand both the technology infrastructure and the physical infrastructure.
  • Creating engaging curriculum delivered in multi-modal formats while working non-traditional academic hours will be Normal 3.0.
  • Multi-modal education at Northern College includes web- and video-based conferencing while employing technology platforms to push out interactive tools for the learners.
  • Normal 3.0 will take us to a highly integrated learning and working model. Postsecondary education will become a continuous process as opposed to an event in a person’s life. Learning will be measured in authentic real-world settings and not by exams. Education will be determined not by degrees, but by accumulated skills. Think the value-chain model versus one-stop shopping.
anonymous

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

www.christenseninstitute.org/...hire-education

shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • online competency-based education stands out as the innovation most likely to disrupt higher education.
  • As traditional institutions struggle to innovate from within and other education technology vendors attempt to plug and play into the existing system, online competency-based providers release learning from the constraints of the academy. By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter—these providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market.
  • The fusion of modularization with mastery-based learning is the key to understanding how these providers can build a multitude of stackable credentials or programs for a wide variety of industries, scale them, and simultaneously drive down the cost of educating students for the opportunities at hand. These programs target a growing set of students who are looking for a different value proposition from higher education—one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, as well as identifiable skillsets that are portable and meaningful to employers.
  • anonymous on 07 Nov 15
     
    Great short piece on CBE and its potential to change higher education.  Introduces a "mini-book' on the subject.
anonymous

The End of College? (or Maybe Just the End of Kevin Carey's Career) | John Seery - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...n-careys-career_b_7186232.html

college FutureofEducation

shared by anonymous on 22 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • ought to write a companion book -- a sequel to The End of College -- called The End of Sex. The argument would go like this: Disruptive innovations in virtual technologies everywhere are rendering residential sex obsolete. Match.com is clearly more efficient than old, clumsy courtship rituals, and improved algorithms will obviate the need entirely for bar hopping. Virtual sex is disease-free and quantifiable. Advancements in robotics, tactile interactivity, customizable AI, and neuro-scientific sensory mapping are all conspiring to supplant old-school face-to-face sexuality. Virtual sex is market-friendly and doesn't rely on unfair status credentials. Carey will probably make good money if he puts forth The End of Sex book, and he'll be able to laugh at stodgy PhDs all the way to the bank.
  • discounts the value of face-to-face human relations and overlooks the inherent (and irreplaceable) joy of such encounters. Many (we'd say most) professors and students do what they do, not because they are motivated primarily by status or job concerns, but because they love learning and learning with others.
anonymous

We Don't Need No Stinking Badges… Or Do We? | The EvoLLLution - 0 views

evolllution.com/...ed-no-stinking-badges-or-do-we

badges Badging

shared by anonymous on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The notion of a student obtaining one large qualification rather than offer an array of micro-credentials (badges) is a thing of the past. From an employer’s point of view, the value of hiring a person with numerous mini-qualifications and a diploma provides a higher confidence in their investment as opposed to the risk involved in hiring a “blue chip” student from a brand name university.
  • UCSD Extension K-16 Programs have begun to implement a micro-credentialing program targeting students enrolled in our pre-collegiate programs. Our strategy seeks to refine the operational process involved in offering badges but also elevate these credentials from an informal acknowledgement to a professionally recognized measure of skills.
anonymous

Credential Transparency Initiative - 1 views

www.credentialtransparencyinitiative.org

CBE CBL Badging

shared by anonymous on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • a lack of transparency in the current credentialing maze has fueled the confusion and created a buyer-beware environment.
  • When every credential is unique to its issuer and impossible to compare with others, they all lose their value to job seekers and employers.
  • Funded by Lumina Foundation, the initiative will develop common terms for describing key features of credentials; create a voluntary, web-based registry for sharing the resulting information; and test practical apps (software applications) for employers, students, educators, and other credential stakeholders.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The registry will include all kinds of credentials – from educational degrees and certificates to industry certifications, occupational licenses, and micro-credentials.
  • will develop a Credential Directory app, which will allow registry users to access the websites of participating credential issuers, build customized directories of credentials based on their own criteria, and publish the results.
  • The goals are transparency and clarity, and to help align credentials with the needs of students, job seekers, workers and employers.
anonymous

Learning Analytics Research for LMS Course Design: Two Studies | EDUCAUSE - 4 views

er.educause.edu/...-lms-course-design-two-studies

LMS analytics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • In 2014 the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) identified three key motivators for faculty use of IT: (1) evidence of benefit to students, (2) course release time, and (3) confidence the technology will work.1
  • In particular, we found that faculty use of the grade center, which ECAR found that students value more than any LMS function,2 is positively related to student outcomes.
  • To frame our discussion, consider the following: If you could predict with 100 percent accuracy which students would succeed or fail — in classes, programs, or graduation — what would you do to intervene and change the predicted outcome? Or as Mike Sharkey, VP of Analytics at Blackboard, often says, "If you're a dog chasing a car, what would you actually do if you caught it?"
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In our experience, this critical transition from prediction to intervention (and assessment of the resulting impact) is actually quite rare in higher education learning analytics research and practice.
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