Competency-Based Education: A Primer for Today's Online Market

A nifty article in today's e-Literate blog brings us all up to speed on the competency based education discussion.  As the title suggests, it's a helpful primer and I commend it for your reading purposes.  I've shared a few of the most interesting points below, but read the entire article for context.

Competency-Based Education: A Primer for Today's Online Market |e-Literate

What actually is “competency-based education” and why has it taken so long to expand beyond Western Governors University?

Why has it taken so long? Although there is a newfound enthusiasm for CBE from the Obama administration, the biggest barrier thus far has been tacit resistance from financial aid and accreditation bodies.

In addition, I would add that the integration of self-paced programs not tied to credit hours into existing higher education models presents an enormous challenge. Colleges and universities have built up large bureaucracies – expensive administrative systems, complex business processes, large departments – to address financial aid and accreditation compliance, all based on fixed academic terms and credit hours. Registration systems, and even state funding models, are tied to the fixed semester, quarter or academic year – largely defined by numbers of credit hours.

Education badges - not like the one Barney Fife wore

Jeffrey Young writes a good summary of the badge concept - competency based learning - which seems to be taking hold (at least in publication and discussion if not in practice).  Comments from Belle Whelan and Kathy Davidson below provide a nice summary of where this issue rests in the higher education community.

'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas - College 2.0 - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The idea of badges hasn't risen to our radar as a concept, but I think we can't ignore it," says Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. "The whole idea of learning beyond high school has changed," she adds. "College used to indicate that not only did you have a skill set in a particular area, but that you gained a body of knowledge that made you a well-rounded person. People don't care about being well-rounded anymore, they just want to get a job."

Fundamentally, badges are all about perception, so it's difficult to predict whether the key players—employers and job applicants—will click the like button on the concept.

"The biggest hurdle is the one I had, which is prejudice," says Cathy Davidson, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University and author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She says she initially viewed educational badges as frivolous, but is now a leading proponent as a co-founder of Hastac.

"People seem to think they know what school is and they know what work is," she says. "We live in a world where anyone can learn anything, anytime, anywhere, but we haven't remotely reorganized our workplace or school for this age."

Classroom discussion forums - are they worth it?

Of note...relatively interesting, and possibly significant work related to the use of discussion in online classes.  It's always puzzled me to determine the value of discussion and this work pokes at the issue.  From Jeffrey R. Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Worth a read.

What a Tech Start-Up's Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Professors may want to think carefully before giving formal grades for participation in online discussions, the data suggest. When professors required a set number of discussion posts, the number of submissions was higher than in courses where professors left participation up to students. But instructors reported the highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked.

Google. And the news.

Who knew?  I think I'm relatively savvy on topics such as this - technology and the changing nature of the news.  But this aggregation and algorithm story from Megan Garber in The Atlantic is worth a read for a deeper dive into the topic.

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry - Megan Garber - The Atlantic

There is, on the one hand, an incredibly simple explanation for the shift in news organizations' attitude toward Google: clicks. Google News was founded 10 years ago -- September 22, 2002 -- and has since functioned not merely as an aggregator of news, but also as a source of traffic to news sites. Google News, its executives tell me, now "algorithmically harvests" articles from more than 50,000 news sources across 72 editions and 30 languages. And Google News-powered results, Google says, are viewed by about 1 billion unique users a week. (Yep, that's billion with a b.) Which translates, for news outlets overall, to more than 4 billion clicks each month: 1 billion from Google News itself and an additional 3 billion from web search.

As a Google representative put it, "That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute."

Google emphasizes numbers like these not just because they are fairly staggering in the context of a numbers-challenged news industry, but also because they help the company to make its case to that industry. (For more on this, see James Fallows's masterful piece from the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic.) Talking to Google News executives and team members myself in 2010 -- the height of the industry's aggregatory backlash -- I often got a sense of veiled frustration. And of just a bit of bafflement. When you believe that you're working to amplify the impact of good journalism, it can be strange to find yourself publicly resented by journalists. It can be even stranger to find yourself referred to as a vampire. Or a pirate. Or whatever.