California Dreams for MOOC Credits Getting Trimmed

In response to faculty protests during a hearing this spring, California legislators are trimming the ambitions of MOOC providers to offer academic credit at all three levels of the state's higher education system. The latest amendments to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg's SB 520 transform the originally envisioned universal online platform to an "incentive grant program." The change shifts downward the number of eligible courses for MOOC credits beginning fall 2014 from the "50 most impacted" to a set of "20 high-demand" lower division courses. The change also moves away from framing the MOOC system as a "one stop" platform for California students to a series of grant-supported efforts led by faculty and leaders within each of the three educational segments. The legislation now calls for the grants to foster collaboration among the three higher education systems--the University of California, the California State University, and the California Community Colleges--and to offer the courses to high school students. In an April hearing, faculty leaders expressed concern about "unproven" private companies being put in charge of students' education.

Useful Higher Ed Assessment Website

The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), based at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, publishes briefs and articles about the challenges of learning assessment in higher education. Peter Ewell reports on progress with the Degree Qualifications Profile, an effort supported by the Lumina Foundation.

Accountability Analysis

States vary widely in how they track college student achievement, according to a new report cited in Inside Higher Ed. Responses to the report are mixed. While the call to account is generally lauded, but attempts to characterize progress as a horse race strike some as gimmicky. In our project, Domain-Specific Assessment, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, we are finding what cognitive scientists such as John Anderson and Richard Clark have found all along: Getting experts, such as postsecondary educators, to articulate the learning outcomes that matter is not so easy. Part of the problem is psychological: When someone becomes an expert in any field, lots of the cognitive work becomes automatic, chunked, and unconscious. Multiple steps become routines that are no longer carefully parsed. This can lead to a gap in how we articulate what it is that students need to learn in higher education. To see full report, check column to left.

Higher Education Accountability

In my morning reading of Inside Higher Ed, I noted that accountability for student learning outcomes was on the docket at a meeting this week among representatives of the U.S. Department of Education, various higher education associations, and accreditation agencies. The upshot of the negotiations, which have been tense in the past, was that institutions of higher learning will continue to set their own agenda for the outcomes they seek to achieve. Efforts to deputize accreditation agencies to define and collect data on other outcomes appeared to be overruled. This action may be framed as a step forward for continued higher education academic freedom or a loss for those concerned about assured consistent quality of learning across various higher education institutions.