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Campbell also said that the project will be much more significant if it ultimately shows whether students' skills improve over time. "If you don't have some kind of comparison of change, showing what they could do when they came in and when they left," she said, "it may do exactly what the rankings do: reinforce the reality that great students produce great work, and great institutions have great students."

Arum said the AAC&U/SHEEO approach has the potential to be one of "multiple indicators" that higher education institutions and policy makers eventually embrace to understand student learning. "No one measure is going to be sufficient to capture student learning performance outcomes," he said. "Responsible parties know there's a place for multiple measures, multiple approaches." Campbell, of Teachers College, agrees that "because [student learning] is such a complicated issue, any one method is going to have complications and potential limitations"

The Results The faculty participants scored the thousands of samples of work (which all came from students who had completed at least 75 percent of their course work) in three key learning outcome areas: critical thinking, written communication and quantitative literacy. Like several other recent studies of student learning, including Academically Adrift, the results are not particularly heartening. A few examples: Fewer than a third of student assignments from four-year institutions earned a score of three or four on the four-point rubric for the critical thinking skill of "using evidence to investigate a point of view or reach a conclusion." Nearly four in 10 work samples from four-year colleges scored a zero or one on how well students "analyzed the influence of context and assumptions" to draw conclusions. While nearly half of student work from two-year colleges earned a three or four on "content development" in written communication, only about a third scored that high on their use of sources and evidence. Fewer than half of the work from four-year colleges and a third of student work from two-year colleges scored a three or four on making judgments and drawing "appropriate conclusions based on quantitative analysis of data."

The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication that aims to promote scholarship in the use of the Internet and web-based multimedia resources in higher education. The first issue appeared online in July 2005 and included a number of invited papers from various disciplines. The journal is now published quarterly in March, June, September, and December.

If we produced high quality work, they would tell other people about it. That became and continues to be one of the driving forces behind our work.

But if you simply follow in the footsteps of people before, at best you’ll become a pale imitation, at works completely ignored.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is that people want quality. Quality rises to the top and stands the test of time.And you don’t create quality by copying what you’ve seen work.