Bologna beyond Europe

Several stories in the higher ed press report on the recent meeting of NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference, which concluded last Friday. Several sessions focused on the Bologna Process and how other countries, including the United States, are adapting elements of it. A few quotes from the Inside Higher Ed story:

...the transformation of European higher education in the past 11 years has been immense. The process, which is premised on “harmonizing” higher education systems throughout Europe and promoting mobility and credit transfer, has largely revolved around improving quality assurance mechanisms and developing comparable degree frameworks and student learning outcomes in specific disciplines. As part of this, universities have moved toward standardized degree cycles (including, in many countries, the three-year bachelor’s degree, which has caused headaches for graduate admissions officers in the United States). They’ve also stated expectations for what those degrees should mean.

A March report on the progress of the Bologna Process by the European University Association found that 77 percent of universities have reviewed the curriculums in all departments under the Bologna Process (compared to 55 percent in 2007). In addition, 53 percent of universities said that learning outcomes have been developed for all courses and 32 percent for some courses. “Bologna,” the association concluded, “has acted as a catalyst to improve quality of teaching and move towards student-centered learning.

In the United States, the Lumina Foundation for Education has plans to build upon a Bologna-inspired pilot project in which universities in three states moved toward “tuning” their degrees in six different fields of study. As part of the initial project, “Tuning USA,” faculty in Indiana (in education, chemistry and history), Minnesota (in graphic design and biology) and Utah (in history and physics) jointly conducted a four-way survey. For each discipline they asked employers, alumni, current students, and other faculty to identify general and subject-specific competencies and rank them. “So you begin to develop a picture of the subject,” explained Birtwistle, who is a consultant to the Lumina project. “You begin to frame the subject, you begin to be able to say what the subject is, and what the students know, understand and are able to do as a result of studying that subject.” Birtwistle emphasized, too, that tuning is a faculty-led process.

Speakers during Friday’s session noted the difficulty of defining an American baccalaureate degree without using the words “credits” or “hours.” “What do we mean as a country by what a degree represents and what the learning is that’s behind a degree?

This last is a particular problem, especially as so many institutions race headlong toward putting more and more courses online. A "semester credit hour" (SCH) used to equate to the amount of time spent in class per week. In the new world of online education, this has become completely meaningless. As long as we were starting with courses originally designed for face-to-face delivery and retooling them for online delivery, it wasn't too hard to keep the content the same in terms of SCHs. But now that courses are being designed from scratch for online delivery, those guidelines are gone. So how do you determine what the content of a course is that's supposed to be worth, say, three SCHs at the freshman level, the junior level?

Why [this discussion] is significant in an American context is it redefines what we mean by quality,” she said. “And quality is student learning. Quality in our current framework is based on institutional reputation and student inputs,” i.e. the scores and backgrounds that students bring into college, rather than those they leave with. “We can’t get to the 60 percent degree attainment that we need without really focusing on quality,” she said, in reference to Lumina’s objective of improving college access. McKiernan acknowledged, however, the challenges in developing common degree frameworks in the United States, where top-down attempts at reform are suspect.

And now, for the rest of the story...