Archive
component:for-whom.credentials
Review: Schooling in the Workplace
A review of Nancy Hoffman's new book, School in the Workplace, How Six of the World's Best Vocational Education Systems Prepare Young People for Jobs and Life. Its blended learning workforce style.
How Technology Can Improve Online Learning—and Learning in General
As president of a nonprofit, online university I am often asked about the quality of online learning. The answer is that the quality of education is largely independent of the mode of delivery. Other variables are far more important. There is high-quality online learning, and there is high-quality classroom learning, just as there is low-quality learning in both settings.
Review: Change.edu
Not too much sparks the fury of the education status quo today than the privatization of education and specifically for profit colleges. Forgotten is the original mission of higher education from its origins at the start of our country: to deliver a practical, useful education. Would our founding fathers be embarrassed at the frivolities of the social programs and free form curriculum offered at many colleges and universities without any thought or reason to the useless degrees and unimaginable college debt accumulated to obtain those degrees?
Good Assessment Key to Strong Accountability
Some #EdReform, #EdEquality, and #EdPolicy colleagues thought my blog Assessment Will Advance When it Moves Into the Background suggested that I didn’t support the idea of summative assessments and their associated use in school accountability systems. This section may have begged the question: We’ll need to invent our way out of…
Review: The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz
This July Anya Kamenetz published The Edupunks' Guide to a DIY Credential, a free eBook that teaches students how to develop a personal learning plan through the use of online resources and a community of self-chosen mentors. The entire book feeds the mind of the edupunk in delivering ways to take advantage of the rapidly growing resources on the Internet to receive a credential.
Digital Media & Learning Competition Leverages Open Badges
A new game-based strategy called Digital Media and Learning Competition, hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC, and Mozilla, plans to leverage badges and badge systems to help people learn and demonstrate skills and knowledge.
Jobs for the Future Launches Credentials that Work
Jobs for the Future (JFF) launched Credentials for Work, a new initiative intended to transform how postsecondary institutions align with occupational training programs through real-time technologies that provide labor market information.
Why Didn’t Early College Catch Fire?
Ten years ago tomorrow Utah Gov Mike Leavitt and I sat down to breakfast with a small group of reporters to brief them on a plan for a network of six early college high schools. The briefing was cut short when the governor’s chief of staff whispered in his ear…
Demonstrated Competence
The goal of school is learning but we still manage it based on time. Students still progress a year at a time after a 180 day school year along with other kids their age. Occasionally politicians call for an end to social promotion, but just mean making struggling students repeat a grade. We didn’t really have a better way to manage matriculation in the era of data poverty.
Promoting Quality Online Learning
Fordham is launching a series of working papers on digital learning. Rick Hess makes an important contribution with the first paper focused on quality