[LINK] Official Online Degrees

[Stephen Loosley]

"Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official"

MARCH 5th 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/upshot/true-reform-in-higher-education-when-online-degrees-are-seen-as-official.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1


Three years ago, technology was going to transform world higher education.  But what happened?

Over the course of a few months early in 2012, Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. for example, started companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. 

The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution.

But today, enrollment at traditional universities remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before.

The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of online courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. 

Universities are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price.  What they don’t offer are official degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what students are paying for.

Now, information technology is poised to transform degrees. 

When that happens, the economic foundations beneath university education will truly begin to tremble.

Traditional degrees are deeply embedded in government regulation and standard human resources practice. It doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are — if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, it’s illegal for a public school to hire you. 

Private-sector employers often use degrees as a cheap and easy way to select for certain basic attributes, mostly the discipline and wherewithal necessary to earn 120 credits.

Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials that will lead to jobs. 

Now technological innovators are working on that, too.

The Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser, has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges project. 

 http://openbadges.org    "Open Badges: a new online standard to recognize and verify learning"

Open Badges are electronic credentials that any organization, collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Open Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why, exactly, the badge was earned.

Traditional institutions, including Michigan State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are experimenting with issuing badges. But so are organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 4-H, the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York.

The most important thing about badges is that they aren’t limited to what people learn in college. Nor are they controlled by colleges exclusively. People learn throughout their lives, at work, at home, in church, among their communities. 

The fact that colleges currently have a near-monopoly on degrees that lead to jobs goes a long way toward explaining how they can continue raising prices every year.

The MOOC providers themselves are also moving in this direction. They’ve always offered credentials. 

In 2013, I completed a semester-long M.I.T. course in genetics through a nonprofit organization run by Harvard and M.I.T., called edX. You can see the proof of my credentials:

https://verify.edx.org/cert/ffda1bd75cd947ccae0c205b50724270
https://s3.amazonaws.com/accredible_user_certificate/certificates/122614/original/open-uri20140318-4217-nq52mp

Inevitably, there will be a lag between the creation of such new credentials and their widespread acceptance by employers and government regulators. H.R. departments know what a bachelor’s degree is. “Verified certificates” are something new. 

But employers have a powerful incentive to move in this direction: Traditional degrees are deeply inadequate tools for communicating information.

The standard degree has roughly the same amount of information that prisoners of war are required to divulge under the Geneva Conventions. College transcripts are a nightmare of departmental abbreviations, course numbers of indeterminate meaning, and grades whose value has been steadily eroded by their inflation.

The new digital credentials can solve this problem by providing exponentially more information. 

Think about all the work you did in university. Unless you’re a recent graduate, how much of it was saved and archived in a way that you can access now? What about the skills you acquired in various jobs?  Digital learning environments can save and organize almost everything. Here, in the “unlabeled” folder, are all of my notes, tests, homework, syllabus and grades from the edX genetics course. My “real” college courses, by contrast, are lost to history, with only an inscrutable abbreviation on a paper transcript suggesting that they ever happened at all.

Open credentialing systems allow people to control information about themselves — what they learned in college, and what they learned everywhere else — and present that data directly to employers. 

In a world where people increasingly interact over distances, electronically, the ability to control your online educational identity is crucial.

This does present a new challenge for employers, who will have to sift through all this additional information. Degrees, for all of their faults, are quick and easy to digest. Of course, processing large amounts of information is exactly what computers are good for. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are designing open badges that are “machine discoverable,” meaning that they are designed to be found by employers using search algorithms to locate people with specific skills.

Protecting private, personal information is a big part of navigating the digital era. But people want certain kinds of information to be as public as possible — for example, that they are very good at specific jobs and would like to find an employer looking for such people. Companies such as LinkedIn are steadily building new tools for people to describe their employable selves. College degrees, by contrast, say little and never change.

In the long run, MOOCs will most likely be seen as a crucial step forward in the reformation of world higher education. 

But their true impact won’t be felt until students and learners of all kinds have access to digital credentials that are also built for the modern world.

--

Cheers, folks
Stephen Loosley
Member, Victorian
Institute of Teaching