I cringe when I see Fast Company parody itself with headlines like How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education — but I found this bit on Western Governors University intriguing:
If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college’s innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment.WGU was formed in the late 1990s, when the governors of 19 western states decided to take advantage of the newfangled Internet and create an online university to expand access to students in rural communities across their region. Today, it’s an all-online university with 12,000 students in all 50 states. It’s a private not-for-profit, like Harvard; the only state money was an initial $100,000 stake from each founding state. WGU runs entirely on tuition: $2,890 for a six-month term.
“We said, ‘Let’s create a university that actually measures learning,’ ” Mendenhall says. “We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree.”
WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. “We asked them, ‘What is it the graduates you’re hiring can’t do that you wish they could?’ We’ve never had a silence after that question.” Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor’s without taking a course.
Most students, though, do the full coursework, working at their own pace through online course modules, playlists of prerecorded lectures, readings, projects, and quizzes. For every 80 students, a PhD faculty member, certified in the discipline, serves as a full-time mentor. “Our faculty are there to guide, direct, counsel, coach, encourage, motivate, keep on track, and that’s their whole job,” Mendenhall says.
Multiple-choice tests are scored by computer, while essays and in-person evaluations are judged by a separate cadre of graders. What WGU is doing is using the Internet to disaggregate the various functions of teaching: the “sage on the stage” conveyor of information, the cheerleader and helpmate, and the evaluator. WGU constantly surveys both graduates and their employers to find out if they are lacking in any competencies so they can continue to fine-tune their programs.
Mendenhall is impatient with those who argue that what he’s doing with education and technology is unworkable. “Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education,” he says. “We’re simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education — if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top.”