Imagine a space where you, as an individual, take some courses from MIT or Stanford, online, open and free. You build your knowledge for knowledge sake. There are two reasons we pursue knowledge:
- personal growth
- obtaining meaningful work that pays a salary that meets our lifestyle expectations
The open course-ware model works perfectly for personal growth. But how does an employer know that you've assembled a body of knowledge that leads to you being a talented individual that is knowledgeable, capable, and hire-able? Right now, degrees provide that university tattoo of knowledge.
Today, each university owns the academic records that make up that tattoo. The student has to meet the requirements of that university to obtain the tattoo.
What if the world was different:
Each student owned their academic records, rather than the educational institution owning the records.
Students might hire a company that is an "academic records repository" or "academic records bank".
Some records in the repository are graded; some are not.
Some records may be combined to present a "Badge" of learning. A Google search on the two words "learning" and "badge" show this growing concept.
Some records, graded and accredited, may be assembled into a traditional degree.
The student assembles a personal tattoo that is not defined by a university, but by the student.
What is the role of the university in this environment? The university may offer some courses for credit and some as open (like Stanford is doing now). The student may obtain the knowledge in either path. One path, the credit path, achieves a higher standard of knowledge certification (i.e., grades). So what the university is really providing is knowledge certification, not just a diploma that represents completion.
What if I, as a student, can build knowledge from several sources, some certified, others open, and record that with the third-party academic records bank that is independent of any particular university? The records bank doesn't certify, but provides the transcript of all the work, instead of the university transcript. The university credit transcript would feed into the academic records bank, as well as open course work, technical certifications and whatever. The employer would request knowledge verification from the academic records bank, not any one university.
The "Big Blue Button" idea of medical records could apply to student records. But if institutions could send directly to the academic records bank, what would be the point of the "Big Blue Button"? Perhaps to make a record withdraw to send to a potential employer.
We are now sending all academic records to the State of Michigan for storage in a state-wide database. Perhaps certifications and other learning mechanisms could feed into that database. So perhaps, down the road, the state will provide the academic records bank.
What does this do to the academic records we store on campus? Is there any reason to keep years and years of campus history if we can store the records in a single centralized bank?
There is potential for a shift in where and how we store student academic history.
One of the issues we are discussing is whether the "course" is the right way to chunk academic records. Most courses have a set of learning objectives that they are designed to teach. This is partially why some courses are pre-requisites to taking another course.
ReplyDeleteWhile tracking academic progress by the course has many benefits, it is not very granular, and as a result it may not provide the right level of transparency in what a student does know. Increasingly, in thinking about the fact that students start at one institution and then transfer to another institution you have the challenge of determining if learning objectives for a prior course were similar enough to allow that course to meet the pre-requisite requirements.
What if we could track learning objectives and what if the learning objectives mastered could be downloaded so the student can be keeping these. Now suppose a student can get learning objectives completed through graded coursework, open courseware, self-study, on-the-job, or service learning. This would allow us to really align the process of students taking courses at different institutions -- they would know what learning objectives are required prior to taking the course and they could develop strategies to meet those requirements.
An important aspect in this is to remember that we don't retain all that we learn. Over time, we see that people retain less and less if they have not had to use that information. What if we could place "time-stamps" on when that knowledge objective outcome was last validated. We can then provide instruments that validate students have these knowledge outcomes still in place that are part of the pre-requisite foundation needed to successfully complete a course.
One model that is appealing in this process is thinking about the badge concept. Supposed learning outcomes were badges had issue dates and last validation dates. The student is able to keep all their badges and augment these as necessary through a variety of methods outlined above. We can then move from course-based prerequisites to more finer grained learning objectives that need to align for success.
I really like the idea of tracking learning objectives. As the "student swirl" practice continues to grow, the experience on our campus is that students overload on credits and time-to-degree is increased. We also see our faculty spending time evaluating course objectives from other universities to keep transfer equivalencies current and material in value. I think the key information technology sentence is: "What if we could track learning objectives and what if the learning objectives mastered could be downloaded?". That is a rethinking of our internal records systems. It also presents an opportunity to vendors to create new campus-independent solutions that record an individual student's mastered learning objectives. Ideally, the student could send their learning objectives to his or her chosen institution to accommodate transfers, or even to potential employers to substantiate learning.
ReplyDeletePretty exciting to think about. Is anyone doing this as an innovative practice?