Students can get college credit for life experience

In theory, it makes perfect sense. What we should be interested in are outcomes. What do you know? What can you do? How competencies were acquired should be of less interest. I fully support efforts to develop valid assessments of the competencies we value, and giving credit for them when they're demonstrated. But all of that is easier said than done.

Add one more thing to the list of tasks that colleges can outsource.

This time, it's assessing "experiential learning"—that is, the skills students have gained in the workplace and other life trials—and determining how many credit hours should be awarded for that learning. Two fledgling organizations are game.

The idea of handing such decisions to outsiders might make some faculty members wince. But the services' creators say that their networks of portfolio evaluators will establish national norms that will make experiential-learning assessment more clear-cut, rigorous, and credible. And as the concept gains legitimacy, they say, it could help hundreds of thousands of people complete college.

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Faculty union leaders support assessment

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education. A couple of quotes to get you going:

The leaders of three large faculty unions say they support assessments of student learning as a means of informing instruction and curriculum, according to a new paper being released by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, an organization that encourages the use of assessment data to shape the conversation about undergraduate education.

In the paper, Lawrence Gold, director of the higher-education department of the American Federation of Teachers, Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, and Mark Smith, a senior policy analyst in higher education of the National Education Association present a united front in advocating that, with local control, faculty should use student-learning assessments to improve students' experiences in the classroom.

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New effort to understand learning outcomes

One of the Quick Takes from today's Inside Higher Ed:

A group of public and for-profit institutions has agreed to collaborate on a project aimed at finding a common way to use the data they collect about students' academic progress to better understand how and why students succeed or fail. The project will be led by WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, and funded by a new $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is designed to bring student-level data (drawn from learning management and student information systems) from six institutions -- American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and the University of Phoenix -- into a common format so they can be stripped of identifying information about students and merged into one dataset. The researchers say this will allow them to study the variables that affect student progress, and test the ability to merge student-level data from numerous and varied colleges in one place -- a goal that some policy makers have laid out as the holy grail of education research.