While the next online model remains unclear, Southern New Hampshire's president, Paul J. LeBlanc, has sketched out one possible blueprint. … The vision is that students could sign up for self-paced online programs with no conventional instructors. They could work at their own speeds through engaging online content that offers built-in assessments, allowing them to determine when they are ready to move on. They could get help through networks of peers who are working on the same courses; online discussions could be monitored by subject experts. When they're ready, students could complete a proctored assessment, perhaps at a local high school, or perhaps online. The university's staff could then grade the assessment and assign credit. … The whole model hinges on excellent assessment.
I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse.
I think the traditional research paper does invite gobbledygook, that's why we get so much gobbledygook from it.
Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers.
Here is a key to why QEP encourages public writing within discourse communities and is moving away from traditional classroom writing aimed solely at a grading teacher.
Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
Imagine that! Our students are becoming MORE literate, not less. This is a core belief of QEP: that the Internet is encouraging more written communications among more people than at any other time in history. We wonder why the Academy is ignoring this wonderful, rich energy.
Assessment is perhaps the single most intractable aspect of traditional education. In some ways, crowdsourcing grades actually violates legal regulations about student privacy. This is a serious issue, but I am confident that we will resolve it.
Current practices of our educational institutions-and workplaces-are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.