So I see that Colleges Ontario has released its wish list for the provincial election campaign. Some of the recommendations are interesting (e.g., the recommendation to give colleges a greater management role in apprenticeship training), some of it is run of the mill (more money for underfunding, etc). But one recommendation in particular is completely baffling: the suggestion that the government should guarantee that students that switch between public institutions within the province should be able to carry two-thirds of their credits with them.

Now, I’m all in favour of credit mobility, but this is grasping at straws. Why two-thirds? Why not three-quarters? Why not 100%? All Ontario institutions at the moment are governed by a qualifications framework that suggests that the learning outcomes at the diploma level and the degree level are quite different. On what basis should we suddenly understand an equivalence of 1 = .66? Or is Colleges Ontario suggesting we should just ignore the framework altogether?

If there is one thing that the we can learn from the experience of Europe – the Bologna process, the Tuning process and the European Qualifications Framework – it is that mutual recognition of credit has to be based on recognized learning outcomes. It means actually going through some fairly hard and detailed system-wide work to get system-wide agreement about how to define learning outcomes, and from there, to actually discuss how learning outcomes at one level relate to those at another. The European Credit Transfer System, for instance, found a way to make credit transferable by standardizing the amount of “expected student effort” per course.

But we don’t seem to like that kind of thing in Canada. We’re lazy. We think we can just wave a wand and tell people to recognize each others’ credits without examination. Colleges Ontario is hardly alone in this – the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada has repeatedly passed resolutions about mutual recognition of credit across the country. The Government of Ontario was so shy of doing the real work required to get credit mobility that in January it decided to throw a lot of money at colleges and universities to encourage more one-off articulation agreements and call it a victory.

So, by all means, let’s get serious about credit transfer. But please, no more gimmicks. Let’s do the hard work, and get down to the business of defining the real learning outcomes on which an intelligent and durable credit transfer system can be based.