Student Outcomes and Competency-Based Learning

Where: Siena College
New Hall
515 Loudon Road
Loudonville, NY
Directions and Map

Registration Fee:
NERCOMP Member: $130
Non-Member: $260
 

Event Overview

Due to low registrations, this event has been cancelled. This event may be rescheduled at a later time. 

Higher education is under fire for costing too much and delivering too little. Course titles and credit hours mean nothing to employers. The President, Congress, and the Department of Education are insisting on a different method of accounting for student progress. When those changes happen, who will be charged with the practical job of making the system work? Provosts and presidents will have to make changes on the strategic level, but who will need to support changes to assessment procedures? Who will need to provide the tools, keep the records, and make the information accessible to faculty, administrators, and potential employers?

Student progress toward degrees has, for a century, been measured by the accumulation of credit hours. But since the rise of online education, the flaws in the credit hour system have become more and more obvious. The criticisms come not just from books like Academically Adrift, but also from legislators and the public. They have charged that the traditional oversight process, based on regional accreditation, has failed to ensure reliable quality. The DOE has threatened to establish its own system of compliance.

Now the Carnegie, Gates, and Lumina Foundations, the American Council on Education, the AAC&U, the Council of Independent Colleges, and NILOA (the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment) are all working together to come up with better measures. Recently, the President has insisted that colleges reduce the cost to students, and the DOE has asked a few institutions to set up competency-based programs. But everything is based on the credit hour. A change from the credit hour would seem to imply drastic, and stunning, changes in the way post-secondary education works.

Whatever changes higher education makes as it tries to become more accountable, Librarians and IT professionals will be in the thick of it. This PDO will prepare you to make sense of it, and enable you to provide sound advice as we work toward better accountability for student outcomes. The prospective audience includes anyone who is either directly supporting the academic program, or supporting the student information systems and methods of recording student achievement—all the way up to deans, CIOs, and directors.

We have gathered an impressive group of speakers [link]. We will be among the first to hear of Capella University’s new program, just approved by the DOE as a model for the rest of us. We will also hear from Empire State College, SUNY’s online institution, from the Lumina foundation about its sophisticated competency approach, the Degree Qualifications Profile, and from a more traditional school, Lehigh, about its attempts to start competency-based assessments.

The “takeaways” will be a deeper understanding of the pressures being applied to institutional presidents, provosts, and deans for greater accountability for assessing student learning, and how this may translate to those of us in the trenches.

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