Programming
Microcredentials, MicroMasters, and Nanodegrees: What’s the Big Idea?
Cathrael Kazin | Managing Partner, Volta Learning GroupHGTV has tiny houses. Higher ed now has microcredentials, including nanodegrees (offered by Udacity), MicroMasters (offered by edX), and Educator Microcredentials (offered by Digital Promise). What’s driving the huge obsession with small? Actually, I’m not sure I can explain the fascination with tiny houses—they look…
What’s My Grade: Why Students Need to Understand Learning and Assessment
Thomas Leary | Manager of Instructional Design Quality at the College of Online and Continuing Education, Southern New Hampshire UniversityFor those with any experience teaching, the question of “what’s my grade?” is a ubiquitous one. For students, grades are the measure of success in the classroom. This norm persists…
Enhancing Student Experience and Success through Technology
Monique Snowden | Vice President for Institutional Planning and Effectiveness, Fielding Graduate UniversityAs an organizational enabler and disruptor, technology neither resides wholly in physical nor virtual realms. Moreover, data is omnipresent between, on and beyond analog and digital borders. In Wanda Orlikowski’s…
Getting to Know Your Students: Five Best Practices for Developing and Managing an Arts-Based or Liberal Arts MOOC
Leah Waldo | Curriculum Manager for Berklee Online, Berklee College of MusicMany have said that the MOOC is dead and many more have listed a myriad of disappointments with the outcome of MOOCs—specifically that they did not live up to the…
The Future of Online Education: Will Our Courses Foreshadow Our Ends?
Anthony Picciano | Executive Officer of Urban Education, City University of New YorkThis article based on material from my new book, Online Education Policy and Practice: The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University (Taylor & Francis/Routledge), which examines the development…
Overcoming Barriers to New Program Development
Tracy Schoolcraft | Associate Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, Shippensburg UniversityDeveloping new academic programs can be a powerful means through which universities evolve, meet the changing needs of student, workplace, and society, attract new audiences, differentiate themselves from others…
Digital Badges Transforming Non-Credit Education: Credit-Bearing Programming Next
Kathleen Radionoff | Dean of the School of Professional and Continuing Education, Madison Area Technical CollegeRecognizing and validating learning for non-credit students is a persistent and age-old problem in the postsecondary space. Given the importance of continuous learning to the success and progress of employees…
Goal 2025: How to Achieve a 60 Percent Attainment Rate in Nine Years
Danette Howard | Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Vice President, Lumina FoundationSince 2008, the goal of achieving a 60-percent attainment rate—that is, 60 percent of working-age adults earning a postsecondary degree or credential—by 2025 has been a distant, but always present,…