{"id":3434,"date":"2011-05-23T23:40:11","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T03:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3434"},"modified":"2013-06-03T08:19:28","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T12:19:28","slug":"turf-defenders-will-love-degree-by-competency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3434","title":{"rendered":"Turf defenders will love degree-by-competency"},"content":{"rendered":"

So it looks like the practical barriers for college students moving between institutions are back in the news with CUNY credit transfer debate<\/a>. Since Kevin Carey argued in favor of open educational credentials<\/a> recently, perhaps I should explain why I think acquisition of credentials through Mozilla’s open badges or some other competency-based system is neither philosophically appropriate nor something in the best interest of students. N.B.: because I am speaking about my experience teaching in a college of education, I should make clear these are my personal perspectives. They may<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0overlap heavily with views of some colleagues, but this is neither a statement of official views or a guarantee that any of my colleagues agree with me.<\/p>\n

First, the acquisition of credentials by the accumulation of compartmentalized competencies tends to hem in programs to the curriculum that can be compartmentalized. That’s not required by any means, but I have witnessed a college (my own) that has been subject to a micromanaging level of review that far surpasses the requirements of students who want to be engineers or nurses. Nursing students at USF have to pass a national exam, and that requires the licensure programs at my university to teach at least the curriculum that appears on the national exam. Students don’t acquire badges in the topics that are covered by the exam–there’s just the exam, beyond coursework and field experiences. In contrast, the Florida Department of Education requires college-based programs to have assessments for each of 12 competencies at several points in the program, and to keep track of those assessments and results for every student who passes through the program, in addition to requiring that graduating students pass a state-level exam after taking coursework and spending time in schools across several semesters. So students have to pay for access to the Chalk and Wire system where their several-dozen key assignments are uploaded and scored. That’s what a badge system looks like in reality.\u00a0This is micromanagement, and even as state statutes require that the state track the outcomes of K-12 students taught by our graduates, I suspect the state will continue to expect this intensity of assessment. As a result, a huge number of hours of faculty time at my college has been diverted to the logistics of running this system. (Yes, it’s electronic; that turns the requirement from a nightmare to simply impossible, which we can accomplish with a little workaholism.)<\/p>\n

Just a brief reminder on context: this is not required by NCATE. It is not required by our institutional regional accreditation agency (SACS). It has no parallel in any other field, to the best of my knowledge. This<\/strong><\/span> is education by the badge.<\/p>\n

Oh, and one more thing: there is no evidence whatsoever that students could transfer accomplishments in these badges to other institutions. Think about the logistics here: you have to match an assignment to a fairly generic outcome (an “accomplished practice” in the state’s lingo). You have to create a rubric. You have to develop some consistency (reliability) in scoring. Right now, higher education in Florida has decades-long experience in running a uniform course numbering system that makes credit transfer much simpler than any system of open badges ever could — could you imagine what would happen if courses had 5-10 badges each, and the job of interinstitutional articulation meant multiplying the current common course catalog by 5 or 10?<\/p>\n

In fact, if I were a turf defender, I would love<\/strong><\/span> the idea of open educational credentials. Bring it on! With a few hours of work I could turn an existing program with a dozen courses into several dozen competencies, each with a different assignment configuration tied to the idiosyncrasies of my current colleagues. Instead of students who come with an AA and may need a handful of courses to get admitted into our upper-division programs, we could generate far more credit hours because we could reject virtually everything a student brings because, well, you have to meet our institutional portfolio requirements. They’ve been published for years! What do you mean your old institution had a different configuration of badges? That’s not really where our program is headed, or maybe it is but we think our unique assessments are better ways to judge competency, or we need to see the (probably unpublished) reliability statistics for the 15 competencies\/badges you are claiming.<\/p>\n

Fundamentally, open educational credentials are closer to scouting badges\/patches than to the type of academic currency that students need in real situations. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, CampFire, etc., all have badge\/patch systems, and except for the closure within an organization, they function much like the open badges Carey advocates. My daughter has a Bronze Award, a Silver Award, and a Gold Award from Girl Scouts (along with dozens of badges across the years); they are all valuable to her — she’s a fourth-generation Girl Scout — but she never expected them to turn into college admissions or a job.<\/p>\n

Where currency is concerned — and transfer credits and credentials are currency — I think the basic principle is keep it simple. Credits are simple; badges are not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So it looks like the practical barriers for college students moving between institutions are back in the news with CUNY credit transfer debate. Since Kevin Carey argued in favor of open educational credentials recently, perhaps I should explain why I think acquisition of credentials through Mozilla’s open badges or some other competency-based system is neither […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-To","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3434"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6020,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3434\/revisions\/6020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}