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Ideas take shape for new accreditors aimed at emerging online providers @insidehighered
- The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is an association that represents colleges and recognizes accrediting organizations. The nonprofit group is mulling whether it could provide “quality review” for entities that fall outside of those that are currently accredited. One likely example would be StraighterLine, an unaccredited, online education company that offers low-cost courses but not credentials.
- Modern States, a play on the name of a regional accreditor, would do reviews for individual online courses, rather than institutions.
- ergeron and Klinsky said their goal is to increase students’ access to low- or zero-cost online courses. While there has been a rapid expansion of these offerings, such as courses from Coursera or edX, the pathway to credit has not kept pace with the technology.
- Modern States will be a nonprofit, Klinsky said. The hope is that it will be a “catalyst” to move traditional colleges to recognize more credits for courses from high-quality providers like Coursera. He wants Modern States to prevent the growth of low-cost online learning from being squashed by entrenched interests in the academy – or by a flood of weak, low-quality alternatives.
- Eaton said possible candidates for these reviews might include the Mozilla Foundation’s badging platform, or even short-term academies like Koru or General Assembly, which provide work-place training in areas like computer programming.
- In contrast, Modern States would review individual courses from online providers to ensure that they are rigorous and academically sound. Students who took those courses would then need to successfully complete an assessment that would seek to measure what they had learned.
- Some players already offer services that are similar to what the two groups are proposing. For example, the American Council on Education (ACE), which is higher education’s umbrella group, does institutional reviews for credit recommendations, which colleges can choose to accept or reject for transfer credit. The bulk of those reviews are focused on training by large corporations, such as McDonald’s. But ACE has also approved a handful of MOOCs for credit recommendations. (The National College Credit Recommendation Service plays a similar role.)
- The excitement about course-based academic reviews is interesting to Deb Adair, managing director and chief planning officer for Quality Matters, a Maryland-based nonprofit group. Quality Matters has conducted certification reviews for almost 5,000 online courses during the last decade.
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https://www.icc.edu/innovation/PDFS/assessmentEvaluation/RevisedBloomsChart_bloomsverbsmatrix.pdf
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http://www.fresnostate.edu/academics/oie/documents/assesments/Blooms%20Level.pdf
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"They will earn salaries that are lower than what assistant professors make at many traditional institutions. And although they will have some hand in guiding the curriculum and in making academic policy, they will not serve as a significant check on administrative power."
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Programs | The Quality Collaboratives | Degree Qualifications Profile
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DQP draft version 2.0 open for public comment until March 15 | Lumina Foundation
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http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/The_Degree_Qualifications_Profile.pdf
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
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