Tag: Learning Outcomes

New Quality Measurement Initiatives

One of the holy grails in higher education – if you’re on the government or management side of things, anyway – is to find some means of actually measuring institutional effectiveness.  It’s all very well to note that alumni at Harvard, Oxford, U of T (pick an elite university, any elite university) tend to go on to great things.  But how much of that has to do with them being prestigious and selective enough to only take the cream of

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MOOCs vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been paying attention at all to higher ed stories in the past year or so, you’ll recognize that, apart from cutbacks, people are mainly talking about two things: Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs), and Learning Outcomes. MOOCs weren’t invented to respond to cutbacks, but policymakers sure seem to treat them as if they were.  The idea that someone out there is giving away courses for FREE just seems like manna from heaven.  Good someones, too: Harvard, MIT, Duke,

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Left Behind Again

One of the most interesting phenomenon in global higher education these days is a movement known as the Tuning Process.  And, surprise, surprise, Canada’s allegedly-globally-linked-in, ultra-internationalized universities are nowhere to be found. The Tuning Process is a process of detailing learning outcomes at the program-of-study level – a mostly faculty-driven process to determine what students should know, and be able to do, by the end of their degree.  What distinguishes Tuning from the kind of learning outcomes process we see

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Modularization vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions. 1)      “Modularization is the Future”.  People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”.  That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too.  This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open

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