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Many of the 600 or so colleges that are trying to add competency-based degrees are focused on adult, nontraditional students who want a leg up in the job market

in collaboration with specific industry partners, where an employer’s endorsement of the credential can lead to a graduate employee getting a promotion.

ther colleges' forays into competency-based education have been in disciplines with professional licensing and a heavy dose of task-based learning, which seems like an easier fit with academic programs based on mastery rather than time in a classroom.

he Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) today announced a new partnership with Western Governors University (WGU) that allows Ohio community college graduates to seamlessly transfer their coursework to WGU while also receiving discounted tuition to the accredited, online university.

WGU will:

Offer Ohio community colleges’ graduates and staff a five percent 5% tuition discount.

Public colleges and universities, which educate the bulk of all American college students, have been slower than their counterparts in the for-profit sector to embrace the potential of online learning to offer pathways to degrees.

continuum of organizational levels

low end of the spectrum, course availability, pricing, transferability of credit, and other issues are all determined at the institutional level, by colleges, departments, or individual professors, resulting in a patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.

The Department took those suggestions, and will be providing institutions with greater regulatory flexibility to design and test new approaches to student financial aid designed to meet the need of these students through several new experiments that will: Enable students to earn federal student aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class by providing federal aid to students enrolled in self-paced competency-based education programs. Provide flexibility for an institution to provide a mix of direct assessment coursework and credit hour coursework in the same program. Allow the use of federal student aid to pay for prior learning assessments, which can allow students—including returning adults or veterans—to decrease their time to get a degree.

Institutions that apply for and are granted these limited waivers would be able to have more flexibility over a portion of their federal student aid in order to implement experiments suggested by colleges, universities and the higher education community. Applications for the new experiments will be due in late September

Department is also announcing today that it will collaborate with the Department of Labor to develop a $25 million grant competition for an Online Skills Academy to support the development of a platform to enable high-quality, free or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, or other employer-recognized credentials

Creating content is an involved process. You can’t simply take a textbook, perhaps in digital form, and load it into a learning management system, bit by bit. The material needs to be organized by degree of difficulty and learning objectives. It has to be grouped into modules and tagged to identify the information that is intended for experts, the material students are expected to learn, and the material that is primarily meant to provoke thought.

Students need to be able to rate content and view others’ ratings and reviews.

he system might determine early on that a given student will find it difficult to pass a test. It could then offer materials to enhance that student’s understanding.

“Why are we doing e-learning?”  Is it to increase tuition revenue?  Decrease costs? Create greater access? Allow greater flexibility for our students? Experiment with new pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, so as to better educate a different generation of students? All of the above?

ultimately the senior no-wake proponents on campus will delay and/or sabotage any meaningful e-learning strategy.

all must understand the risks of NOT advancing one.

Understanding the changing dynamics of the big players in online learning is important - but I fear that these numbers may dissuade some institutions from exploring distance education

An alternative way to think about online learning is not about scale - or even really about revenue generation - but about specialization.

Online programs can be a vehicle to highlight differentiation. What school, department, program, or area of research does your school do better than anybody else? What degree programs are you most proud? What areas of teaching and knowledge creation have you build a critical mass of faculty?