Author: WCET Frontiers

Higher Education in the Year 2050: The Age of IoT Global Connectivity

By WCET Frontiers

January 21, 2016

Have you met Robbie Melton, Tennessee’s emerging education technologies evangelist? We sent her back to the future and an in today’s guest blog post, she shares what she found there. Thank you Robbie!

What are your thoughts about the future?
Russ Poulin, WCET

Hello, I’m Robbie Melton, and I’m writing this blog from the future, the Year 2050. Come join me in a futurist discussion of how technology has transformed education in the years to come.

Blogging to you from 2050, I want to reveal that everything that I interact with including utensils, clothing, furniture, flooring, lights, cars, weather, people, and even myself will instantaneously and automatically provide data ‘to me’ and ‘about me’ that will determine on-demand in real time my education pathways. I want you to know that in the future that I am my own teacher, evaluator, and employer.

The predictions by Tina Barseghian, ‘School Day of the Future in the Year 2025’, are now universal standards across the globe , “Gone are the days when the adults involved in learning primarily served as teachers, administrators, and tutors. Now a whole host of learning agents support learning, with some specializing in particular content and others focusing on pedagogy or assessment design. Networked collaboration is the norm.” Furthermore,

Amid a culture of flexible innovation, learners shape their own learning experiences, drawing upon a rich learning geography to identify resources that meet their needs.
Personalization of learning experiences are the norm, so the K-20 system no longer dominates learning. Those schools and districts that remain have become part of a complex and vibrant set of options that together form a loose learning ecosystem. Learning is available 24/7 and year round across many learning platforms and beyond geographic limits.
Smart networks of resource providers form lightweight, modular learning grids to offer flexible learning experiences as demand dictates.

Would you believe in the future that there is no more teaching; only learning; no more schools and classrooms, only 24/7 living learning environments; and no more curriculums, only data driven content for addressing learning on-demand and/or prepared predictive based learning. Yes, Hal Varian’s vision, Chief Economist for Google, is now a reality, “The biggest impact on the world is the universal access to all human knowledge.” There is no limitation to Internet access and mobile devices, smart tools and wearable data tech are available at no cost to everyone worldwide. Please know that this is having a significant impact on literacy and numeracy; resulting in a more informed and more educated world population.

Come take a peak of my world in 2050. Watch how we are incorporating education and technology into our daily lives:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDiqP8mInx8&w=560&h=315]

You will note that the primarily role of an educator in 2050 is to design and code/program items and situations (virtual, augmented, and real) for students to interact with and to connect to for personal and adapted learning opportunities.

Also, in 2050, the core design of education delivery is based on “A global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things” . Many of the following innovations were predicted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project way back in 2014,

Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries. The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters more planetary relationships and less ignorance.
The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior.
Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.

CLASS of 2050

For degree obtainment and verification, David Hopkins’ (2014) forecast is now mainstreamed, “Competency-based degrees are no longer limited to schools, colleges, or universities in providing the learning ‘degree’. Students are now able to take MOOCs from anyone and any provider, whereas, businesses like Starbucks can now provide their staff with ‘degrees’ depending on the prescribed content and outcomes. . . .Unlike in the past, the best tutors will not be professors or dons, but something similar to coaches and caddies, there to help motivate, soothe after frustrations, and offer advice on which tools to use in a rough spot. . .

Unfortunately, in the Year of 2016, we are still addressing ‘human dynamics and social issues in education’, “even in 2050, computers will not have cured us of vanity and folly. Although it may be faster, cheaper, and easier to learn anything than ever before, the status-based campus may be with us yet.” – See more of this look at the future by David Hopkins.

Click here to transport into the Year 2050 Blog.

Together, we will address questions and concerns about the future impact of the transformation of education and technology based on leading futurist experts and your insight). Let’s explore the possibilities for shaping education for the 22nd Century….or next semester, whichever comes first.

Dr. Robbie K. Melton, 2016
1^St App-ologist (Curator of Smart Apps and EduGadgets as Education and Workforce Tools)
Associate Vice Chancellor for Emerging Mobile Technologies
Tennessee Board of Regents
www.appapedia.org

References:

Tina Barseghian, ‘School Day of the Future in the Year 2025’, are now universal standards across the globe
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/01/12/school-day-of-the-future-learning-in-2025/

Hal Varian’s vision, Chief Economist for Google, Digial Digial Digital Life in 2025 BY JANNA ANDERSON AND LEE RAINIE
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/03/11/digital-life-in-2025/

The World on 2050 the Best Technology Best Education (YouTube: https://youtu.be/BDiqP8mInx8)

David Hopkins, Classrooms in 2050, Technology Enhaned Learning Blog,
http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/elearning/classrooms-in-2050/

Access, Credentials, Digital Learning, Innovation, Personalized Learning, Student Success, Virtual/Augmented Reality

Practice

Emergence of the Linked Services Sector in American Higher Ed & Lifelong Learning

By WCET Frontiers

January 14, 2016

By now, it borders on trite to declare that American higher education, and, in fact, global higher education stands on the precipice of dynamic, revolutionary, and disruptive change. But the cards that I see being dealt as we enter 2016 indicate that the fracturing of higher education’s dominant model will not only continue, but accelerate.

This fracturing will occur within the context of worsening budget woes for most institutions, be they public, private, or proprietary. As admissions flatten and/or decline, state appropriations flatten and/or decline, and the federal government ratchets up its accreditation, accountability and loan reforms, many existing institutions find themselves in a large-scale version of musical chairs, trying desperately avoid being among those without a place to sit when the music stops.

In future blogs, you will hear from Michelle Weise from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and Robbie Melton from the Tennessee Board of Regents as they address how SNHU will build on its innovations in forging its path to the future and the ubiquity of technology, respectively.

The Future is About What the Technology Allows Us to Do

It is, to paraphrase James Carville, “about the technology, stupid.” But it is beyond what the technology can do. It is about what technology and data allow us to do, as learners, education providers, and employers. And, through this lens, I see significant impacts in at least four areas of activity:

well-branded and currently healthy public and private institutions, including the Land Grant institutions and state flagship institutions (20%),
the remaining traditionally organized accredited institutions (80%),
the existing “leaders of the innovation pack” such as WGU, ASU, UMUC, Excelsior, Charter Oak, Kaplan University and SNHU, and
a soon-to-be burgeoning non-institutional sector focused on the relationship between competency and work-readiness, regardless of traditional educational attainment.

Much has, and will be written on the first three. It is on the fourth sector of activity that I would like to focus.

The Growth of the Non-Traditional Education Options

For the last five years at least, we have seen major innovations, departures from the norm, like MOOCs, the Global Open Courseware Consortium (now the Open Education Consortium), the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework (PAR), StraighterLine, and Open Study. Each has, in its own way, spot-lighted a specific function or service that can be done differently, more effectively, more cheaply, and/or better with new technologies.

Now there is a whole new area of endeavor, which I will call “linked services”, which operates beyond the boundaries of the traditional model and without its imprimatur. The “linked services” sector shifts the focus away from institutional approval as a pre-condition for success and towards a far more horizontal enterprise, a collection of linked services that shift the learning/assessment of competency enterprise towards the workplace or the objectives of the learner, separate from institutions of higher education.

The “linked services” sector (LSS) is fraught with unknowns, of course. That is what happens when you strike out boldly into uncharted territory. But there are some early, emerging themes that distinguish its activities, values, participants, and approaches from the other three.

The LSS wants to organize around shared understandings of competency and qualifications.
The LSS ties its accountability to the learner and the employer, not the college or university.
The LSS includes government agencies, state and local governments, and other for- and non-profit groups working complementarily to achieve the goal of far improved alignment between assessed learning, competence, and work.
And the LSS will, I believe, welcome higher education into the sector, but will not allow them to dictate the terms of engagement. For the first time, using competency-based assessment principles, employers and third parties will determine and share with the public not only what was taught, but , more importantly, what was learned, and what is necessary for work readiness on Day One. They will do this as equal players on a level field with institutions of higher education and educational accreditation groups.

Examples of the “Linked Services” Sector

Here are three examples that, I believe, herald the dawning of the LSS era.

The Credential Transparency Initiative (CTI)
The CTI is led by an Executive Committee that includes major educational and economic players, including the Business Roundtable, the Committee for Economic Development, the Manufacturing Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce. Educational members include several institutions, the AACC, ACE, and UPCEA. The CTI vision sees “A Coherent, Transparent Credentialing Market”. And their goals are “transparency, clarity, and to align credentials with the needs of students, job seekers, workers, and employers.” CTI plans to achieve these goals beginning with 100 pilot sites that address three objectives:

Define common terms for credentials and credentialing organizations and Quality Assurance (QA) bodies that accredit, endorse, or approve them;
Create a voluntary web-based registry; and
Develop and test software apps that facilitate use of the registry.

This work is challenging and complex. But I believe that, by positioning themselves in the LSS, the Credential Transparency Initiative has a good chance of establishing a badly needed beachhead in the credentialing transparency world.

Innovate-Educate
Innovative-Educate has, as its goal, nothing less than “nationwide adoption of new industry-driven, competency-based hiring frameworks and alternative jobseeker training and credentialing.” They open up the opportunity to connect a person’s competence both to instructional activities and also to the specific job readiness competencies required by employers. It is a short step from that connection to an assessment of the same evidence (data) for academic value.

Educational Quality Through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP) Although this new experimental initiative may be confusing to some observers given other departmental initiatives, it gives us a look into one version of what the future in the LSS might look like. The key phrase in the EQUIP introduction is. “…will allow participating institutions to provide title IV aid to otherwise eligible students pursuing program of study for which 50 percent of more of the content and instruction is provided by one or more title IV ineligible organizations (non-traditional providers).”

This means that the horizontal world of non-traditional service providers, with appropriate oversight and QA, can be brought from the margin to the mainstream by institutions which choose to work with them.

The Linked Services Sector is upon us!

photo of Peter Smith Peter Smith

WCET Executive Council Chair

Advisor to the President, Kaplan University

Photo Credit: State Library of South Australia

Access, Competency-based Education, Credentials, Credits, Managing Digital Learning, MOOC

Practice

Adaptive Learning: Standing Up to Three Major Educational Challenges

By WCET Frontiers

January 7, 2016

In this week’s blog on adaptive learning, I will share some benefits of using adaptive learning in higher education based upon the three major challenges Richard Culatta, former Director of the Office of Educational Technology for the U.S. Department of Education, says America faces in educating our citizens.

Technology’s Impact on Learning
In a 2013 TED Talk on Reimagining Learning, Richard Culatta, (Twitter handle: @rec54), argued that the United States faces three major challenges in educating our citizens that technology is “uniquely suited to solve”:

We must stop treating all learners the same.
We must vary the schedule to allow learners to learn at their own pace.
We must capture critical performance data sooner to help learners succeed.

In the video, Culatta explains you cannot simply convert traditional instructional practices into a digital format and then expect anything other than “No Significant Difference” as the result. Technology allows us to totally reimagine the way we do education in this country. I agree with Culatta’s argument that technology allows us to do things that simply were not possible before. Now, we can create an entirely new learning experience for our students. As Culatta suggests, we should implement this new learning experience and then compare student outcomes to those using traditional learning models to see if there is a difference.

So now that we have addressed the looming question about technology’s impact on learning, let’s discuss how the use of adaptive learning technologies and systems addresses each of these challenges Culatta mentions.

3 Key Benefits of Adaptive Learning:

Meeting Individual Learners’ Needs.
Addressing Demographic & Socioeconomic Factors.
Data, Data, Data.

Meeting Individual Learners’ Needs

Meeting individual learners’ needs requires that we stop treating all learners the same. Today’s learners come to us with a wide range of knowledge, skills, abilities, and disabilities and thus require very unique strategies to meet their individual needs. Getting to know each learner – what they already know, which of their skills are strong and which need developing, the unique abilities and deficits each learner brings to the classroom – is important to know before you can effectively teach that learner.

Researchers argue that incoming knowledge, what learners already know, is THE single most important factor determining future learning (Shute & Zapata-Rivera, 2008). With this in mind, an accurate learner profile is critical in establishing a learner’s optimal starting point in their pathway. Adaptive learning (AL) does this by identifying what each learner knows as they begin a new lesson and then continues monitoring their progress by showing faculty exactly where each learner is in the learning process, what they are having trouble with and the supports needed to help them get back on track. Likewise, AL also prevents faculty from holding back learners who are ready to move forward by allowing learners to move at a pace that is best suited to meet their learning needs. So, if a learner has more knowledge on the current topic, they are not only allowed to move along the pathway faster but could also be allowed to take on greater challenges to extend their knowledge or be allowed to move on to the next learning node, or topic in their pathway.

Addressing Demographic & Socioeconomic Factors

Access to quality education or resources is one of the major reasons there is such a large gap in student achievement in our country. For this reason, we must stop keeping the schedule constant while varying the degree to which students learn and keep learning constant allowing the schedule to be varied. Every learner is different and so is their prior knowledge. Those with greater prior knowledge will grasp new concepts more quickly because they have a mental model they can easily attach the new incoming knowledge to and thus quickly make sense of it. However, for those who lack enough prior knowledge, the new knowledge can be quite challenging to grasp primarily due to the fact that the learner has no mental model to recall.

The use of adaptive learning helps close this gap by providing access to learning in ways that meet the needs of your individual learners. So for learners who lack prior knowledge, an adaptive system can quickly determine this through the ongoing knowledge checks and seamlessly offer those learners a learning path more suited to meet their individual needs and knowledge gaps. For the learner who has a substantial amount of prior knowledge, he/she can not only move ahead but could also complete the lesson quicker and move on to more challenging lessons where they may need more or less time to complete. In doing this, learners all reach the same outcomes (learning) but at varying rates (schedule).

Recently, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education created a report on over 70 research studies, Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning, providing concrete examples of how technology has made a positive impact on student success. The evidence provided in their report is powerful and, if your institution is committed to reaching those at-risk, this is a must read to open your eyes to the numerous ways in which technology, such as adaptive learning, can empower higher education institutions to meet learners where they are and ensure every student reaches the outcomes set for each course. There is a great video about this work on the Alliance for Excellent Education website I would also recommend viewing.

Data, Data, Data

As an educator for nearly 20 years now, one of the most time consuming aspects of my job is assessment and evaluation. More frustrating than the time required to grade student’s work, provide effective feedback, and analyze assessment data is the fact that by the time I am done, we have already moved on to the next lesson and then I have to figure out how to circle back and tie in any reteaching that may need to be done with the current lesson! Obviously, I cannot do this for only one student and I constantly have to make the difficult decision of when to reteach and when to move on – essentially deciding to leave some students behind.

An adaptive learning system (ALS) monitors and assesses student’s work, providing personalized feedback, and organizing data for each learner and each outcome as well as the entire class in real time and at a very granular level. An ALS collects hundreds of data points on each learner every second they are logged and neatly organizes the enormous data so that the professor can easily determine who needs help, who is ready to move on, and what challenges students are ready to tackle when they meet next. Now professors can spend more class time engaging students one-on-one and in small groups to solve real-world problems and challenges they will likely face in the workplace.

RealizeIt and Smart Sparrow have produced a couple of YouTube videos that give you a deeper look into how an ALS can help a professor teach to each student and not the class. Another adaptive learning platform, CogBooks, offers insight on how using an adaptive learning system can allow professors to teach uniquely to each student.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvRMIuWngeU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1oLmPAFcA4

Want to learn more about adaptive learning? Be sure to check out the resources on our WCET adaptive learning issue page and follow along on our weekly adaptive learning twitter chats Thursday at 6pm MST (8pm EST/ 7pm CST/ 5pm PST) using #WCETAdaptive.

Niki Bray

WCET Fellow, Adaptive Learning
Instructor|Instructional Designer
School of Health Studies
University of Memphis
@adaptivechat

Adaptive/Personalized Learning, WCET

Practice

The Promise of Adaptivity

By WCET Frontiers

December 8, 2015

WCET seeks to raise awareness on the why, how and what of adaptive learning; to develop a community of faculty, administrators, designers and providers to share promising practices and ideas; and for WCET to be a valuable resource on this important emerging application of technology. To support this, we have selected Niki Bray to serve as our 2015-2016 WCET Fellow on Adaptive Learning. This is her first blog post in a series to come over her time as Fellow about adaptive learning. You can also join her weekly on Thursday nights from 6 – 7pm MT, for #WCETAdaptive twitter chat. Follow her @adaptivechat. Welcome and thanks, Niki!

At this year’s WCET Annual Meeting, Dale Johnson asked the participants in the session to imagine a heterogeneous incoming class, whether it be a freshman class or an adult learner class that’s coming back after years of being out of college, and being able to guide them, understand where they need additional support, and being able to personalize the learning based upon individual needs, such as a learner who needs a video instead of a section of reading – that is the promise of adaptive learning.

I had the opportunity to participate in this session with Dale Johnson, Arizona State University, as well as Thomas Cavanagh, University of Central Florida, Dror Ben Naim, Smart Sparrow, Nick White, Capella University, and Judith Komar, Colorado Technical University, arguably a panel of the top leaders in adaptive learning. The session was Adaptive Learning as an Applied Innovation: How to Get Started and in this post I summarize Dale’s discussion of how using adaptive learning improves student success. In the future I’ll publish additional posts about the adaptive learning insights from the Annual Meeting.

As an educator we can all agree that students typically fall into one of three categories for each unit of instruction throughout the semester – below the expected level of prior knowledge, at or near the expected level of prior knowledge, and above the expected level of prior knowledge. In Dale Johnson’s opening remarks to this session, he discusses the promise of adaptivity. In his commentary, he shares the fact that Arizona State University has some lecture-based courses with nearly 400 students enrolled in a section. The use of adaptivity, Johnson contends, allows professors in these large size courses to identify who needs help, who is on track, and who needs to be challenged – the key issue behind the concept of differentiation. Using the tools that adaptive systems provide, Johnson suggests, allows the professor to determine precisely what each student needs help with and the best way to help at scale. Now, we can single out students who not only need additional support but also those who can accelerate their learning and move in a more rapid fashion.

Prior to the use of adaptivity, detailed information about student progress, specifically at the granular level, was virtually impossible to determine for even a small number of students much less classes with large enrolments. At best, most professors today do not know how students are progressing until the first exam, which is oftentimes the midterm exam. By this time, it is often too late to provide the additional support students need to improve learning as too much time has passed and likely the class has moved on to other lessons. The adaptive learning systems that are available now give us information that we have never had before and they allow us to know where students are relative to the curriculum and to other students at any moment in time during the duration of the course. Imagine being able to know exactly where students are in their learning and what they are struggling with at any given time. Also imagine immediately knowing what you need to do to be able to help them – thanks to the big data being collected in the background.

A member of the audience posed the question to Johnson about the role of adaptive learning for supplemental instruction. Johnson responded by suggesting that adaptive learning works across the entire spectrum of learning needs, be it earning a credential or earning a credit. Oftentimes, students who are required to take remedial math, for example, have to pay in upwards of $1,500 for the course and they do not get any college credit for taking it. “That’s a tragedy!” Johnson exclaims. He suggests that the use of an adaptive system can eliminate the need for these remedial courses, which a high number of students drop or withdraw, and save students money, too.

On my next Frontiers blog, I’ll share the benefits of adaptive learning.

Niki Bray
WCET Fellow, Adaptive Learning
Instructor|Instructional Designer
School of Health Studies
University of Memphis
@adaptivechat

Access, Adaptive/Personalized Learning, Data and Analytics, Student Success, WCET, WCET Annual Conference

Practice

NROC, EdReady, and Continuous Innovation

By WCET Frontiers

December 3, 2015

For those who attended the annual meeting, you already had in introduction to EdReady by The NROC Project as a 2015 WOW Award winner. They created a great video that explains the basis of the project, but we asked Ahrash Bissell, EdReady Project Manager, to share more about the project in today’s post. Thank you Ahrash and congratulations to the entire EdReady team!

The non-profit NROC Project (NROC) was founded in 2003 (under the legal name Monterey Institute for Technology and Education), with the mission to “. . . help meet society’s need for access to effective, high-quality educational opportunities in an era of rapid economic, social, and personal change.” In that vein, NROC has pursued a number of strategic initiatives over the years, including new approaches to distributed content curation and dissemination, cutting-edge multimedia development, production and redistribution of open educational resources (OER), and more.

Our latest initiative, EdReady, a 2015 recipient of the WOW Award, brings a certain coherence to these various prior and ongoing efforts at NROC. Here, I’ll relate a brief history of The NROC Project and the principles that led to the design and launch of the EdReady platform.

Discovery & Curation: the Foundation of The NROC Project

We now live in a digital age. At least when it comes to information transfer and access to knowledge, digital modes of creation and transmission now dominate the landscape. Even if the end-product is not digital, such as a printed book, the source material is almost certainly digital, and most of the creation and editorial processes depend on digital tools and media.

For the most part, this massive digitization shift has unleashed new opportunities and capabilities for students and educators. Where access to fundamental knowledge would have previously been limited to the number of volumes in the school or local library, or whatever books a family could afford to own, now a person has access to more information at the click of a button than what is contained in all of the world’s libraries and bookstores put together. But the sheer volume of material creates new problems, especially around the discovery and curation of appropriate materials, and the alignment of those materials to desired educational goals.

The NROC Project has tackled this issue head on from inception. We have a core editorial staff that not only builds cutting-edge, multimedia learning materials that people need, but also identifies and curates materials created by other people and projects. These materials are disseminated for free via a site we built and maintain called Hippocampus.org, and we know that millions of teachers and students benefit from accessing the materials on Hippocampus every year. Educational institutions – from schools to entire systems – recognized the value of this work; thus, our institutional membership model grew over the years, providing the beginning of a sustainable foundation for the work to continue.

However, despite these usage numbers, we also heard from many NROC members and other colleagues that they did not feel that simple access to materials, no matter how excellent, was really changing their practices or supporting innovation in the classroom in any fundamental manner. It became clear that we needed to situate these materials in a context that not only solved pressing problems educators and students face today, but then could provide an infrastructure for promoting and supporting innovative practices into the foreseeable future. At the same time, we had been exploring ideas around “adaptive” or “personalized” learning, as well as social and political barriers to the creation and adoption of OER. In addition, we had acquired deep expertise in developmental education as a result of building a next-generation developmental math program, and we saw that the massive, national crisis around college and career readiness offered an opportunity to target our efforts and bring tangible, positive impact to people’s lives.

Personalized Learning with EdReady

When we stepped back and considered how these different facets of our work played off each other, we realized that we had an opportunity to bring it all together by building a lightweight yet highly customizable platform for personalizing learning. We decided to call that platform “EdReady.” We launched EdReady in 2014, with a strong focus on college and career readiness in math.

For far too many students, lack of sufficient math competency is an insurmountable barrier to further college and improved career prospects. Unfortunately, most educational institutions treat this issue as a logistical problem rather than a learning problem. They ask students to achieve generic benchmarks in order to begin or progress through post-secondary programs of study without adequately considering why the students need to demonstrate this knowledge and what might be the most efficient way to help them get there.

Contextualizing Student Needs

One of the primary principles behind EdReady’s design is to take each student for who they are and then contextualize their needs according to where they want to go. “Math competency” makes little sense unless you ask “competency for what?” In EdReady’s case, students can choose among various goals, ranging from more general aspirations like passing the SAT or scoring highly on placement exams, to more specific aspirations like preparing for an advanced welding certification or preparing to be a nurse’s aide. These goals are defined in the EdReady platform by the specific math skills that are actually required for success. In this manner, the EdReady system differentiates among each user by recognizing that the paths forward for college and career are going to vary for each person.

Similarly, EdReady does not arbitrarily bin and sort students according to some generic measure of “readiness.” Instead, EdReady administers an initial diagnostic explicitly appropriate to the intended pathway and then ascertains each student’s contextualized strengths and weaknesses. Nearly all students are some distance from their desired competency goals – all we need to know is how far the distance is and which skills are most critical for closing that gap.

With a clear idea of where students want to go and where they stand in reference to that goal, EdReady provides a “study path” that will help them get there, complete with all of the necessary learning materials. The critical factor here is that all of this information and support is provided in context to their specific aspirations. What might have previously been abstract and useless math concepts can take on new clarity and meaning when they are presented as explicitly necessary for success in the program or career of choice.

Operational Transparency

Another principle of EdReady’s design is operational transparency. We are seeking to educate people, not just get them through hoops and hurdles. With that in mind, we knew that we needed to employ a light touch when it comes to adaptive learning, scoring algorithms, and other mechanics of the EdReady experience. The scoring methods used by EdReady are quite easy to figure by hand, and we use a common basis for measuring student progress across all goals and assessments, no matter how much they might differ in their specified scope of math skills.

Customization to Fit Shifting Needs

A third principle is that the EdReady platform had to be able to accommodate a diversity of assessment strategies, as well as a diversity of learning interventions. Technically, you can gain some discriminating power by deeply integrating specific assessment items with specific interventions, creating a tightly scripted experience that works really well for the specific use case for which it was designed. But that was essentially the antithesis of what we were trying to achieve. Since we work so closely with institutional partners, we know that their needs differ substantially, sometimes even within an institution. Furthermore, needs change, and we needed EdReady to be able to change along with them. EdReady allows students and educators to specify precise learning objectives by way of defining a goal, thus enabling the platform to support millions of possible paths, all of which are easy to deploy or refine as needed. Further customization can be provided by choosing specific (OER) interventions from the library, or (soon) by choosing among specific collections of assessment items. Proof of EdReady’s extraordinary flexibility can be seen in the great diversity of populations targeted (including middle schools, high schools, postsecondary institutions, adult education centers, etc.) and use cases deployed to date (including many different pedagogical approaches ranging from completely online to fully classroom-based courses).

There has not been much time since EdReady was officially launched and available to the world, but the results thus far have been overwhelmingly positive. However, sustained impact will only be achieved by identifying opportunities for further improvement and continuously engaging with students, educators, and our institutional members in that process. We believe that EdReady and the NROC membership structure offer a solid basis for this work, and we hope that we can provide inspiration and guidance for others who are seeking to build a new model for sustained educational innovation in the digital age.

We welcome inquiries and comments from anyone. If your institution is considering new models for college and career readiness, we encourage you to get involved with our membership. Learn more about our work at theNROCproject.org.

Ahrash Bissell, Ph.D.

EdReady Project Manager

Access, Adaptive/Personalized Learning, Data and Analytics, Open Educational Resources, Personalized Learning, WCET, WCET Annual Conference, WOW Award

Practice

Serving Older Students with New Technologies: Highlights from #ACCN15

By WCET Frontiers

December 1, 2015

Last month, just ahead of the WCET Annual Meeting, the Adult College Completion Network held their annual Workshop, focused on garnering discussion of how we best serve adult learners and bring them back into higher education. Today, Christina Sedney, project coordinator for the Adult College Completion Network (ACCN), shares the highlights of the meeting with us. Thank you, Christina!

When you think about innovation in higher education, your natural next thought might not be “returning adult learners,” but maybe it should be. Perhaps a bit counterintuitively, this older student population in many ways represents the future of higher education.

Projections indicate that fewer than 3.3 million students will graduate from the nation’s high schools this coming spring, while 36 million working-age adults in the United States have some college credit, but no degree. This is not to say that tens of millions of adults are beating down the doors at institutions across the country—many do not have plans to return to higher education and some have high-value certificates not captured in the current “some college, no degree” statistics—nevertheless the data are clear that the “typical” college student is no longer 18 and straight out of high school. The people, programs, and policies that support returning adult students have important lessons to offer a higher education community gradually coming to realize that serving nontraditional students will be a big part of their new normal.

The Adult College Completion Network (ACCN) Annual Workshop provides an opportunity for those working in the space to come together and share their challenges and strategies for addressing them, building a collaborative learning community of practitioners and policymakers. This year’s workshop showcased a variety of innovative projects and programs around the country leveraging technology to serve this critical, often overlooked population.

Partnerships with Alternative Credit Providers: Many adult students seek out online classes and programs, needing flexibility as they manage family and work obligations. Yet at the same time, older students are often unfamiliar with the medium and are hesitant to spend the time and money required to try a fully online course. Institutions such as Western Governors University (WGU) and the University of Memphis are tackling this issue by partnering with alternative credit providers—StraighterLine and Saylor Academy respectively—to offer their students and prospective students a low-cost avenue to enter or complete their programs. The early results of both initiatives are promising and may be of particular interest given the Department of Education’s recent announcement of the EQUIP experimental site initiative.
Leveraging Technology to Boost Retention & Completion: A number of projects and programs represented at the ACCN workshop are using interesting new approaches to help their adult students succeed. These ranged from the development of hybrid competency-based programs at Salt Lake Community College’s School of Applied Technology to University of Maryland University College’s four week “Jumpstart” online course. The Jumpstart course takes new adult students through the process of designing an individualized learning plan (the program’s early results demonstrated a positive effect on consecutive term enrollment and one-year retention, compared to a matched control group). In a different approach, the University of Phoenix has developed a “Career Guidance System” (CGS), a platform students can use to guide their job search process. The CGS links students to job postings relevant to their interests, provides information on different career tracks, and connects them with career coaches to work on skills such as resume writing – all through a personalized online dashboard. Given the large percentage of University of Phoenix students who identify as actively job-seeking, the CGS was developed by the school as a retention tool. On a statewide level, evidence from the Credit When It’s Due project suggests that states with integrated data systems and the technological capacity to run preliminary degree audits are better positioned to boost associate degree attainment through reverse transfer.
Technology-based Tools for Marketing & Recruiting: A number of workshop attendees are working hard to ensure adults seeking to return to postsecondary education have accurate, easy to use information on the programs and institutions available to them. The Southern Regional Education Board has developed org to provide a searchable repository of adult-friendly programs around the country, while the Maine Development Foundation has developed a similar resource for adults in Maine looking to return to school and for employers working to provide their employees with avenues towards a credential. Meanwhile, the College In Colorado site provides information on courses of study linked to the state’s major industries. Attendees also heard from startup New Ed Inc. which is working to launch a cloud-based engagement platform that can provide post traditional students with comparable information on programs’ costs and career options. Connecticut’s Go Back to Get Ahead initiative was also represented, and detailed how they successfully used a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and temporary staff in conjunction with a statewide marketing campaign to connect potential returning adults to the right program for their credential completion needs. The Graduate! Network also shared how some of their members use a CRM to manage a comprehensive employer engagement strategy.

In addition to the concrete examples presented, more general considerations—for example how new types of credentials such as digital badges might fit into a comprehensive national credentialing framework—generated lively discussion among the attendees. Questions of quality assurance, whether for badges, CBE, or PLA also featured prominently throughout the day-and-a-half workshop. Here at the ACCN we are looking forward to taking these conversations further in the coming months. If you’d like to join us, you can join the network, explore our website, or reach out to me with any questions.

Christina Sedney
Project Coordinator,
Adult College Completion Network, WICHE

Practice

Uncategorized

IPEDS Changes Will Improve Available Data on Non-traditional Students, yet…

By WCET Frontiers

November 19, 2015

Today we welcome our WICHE colleague, Christina Sedney, project coordinator for the Adult College Completion Network (ACCN), as she shares with us the changes to IPEDS reporting that will improve, if not drastically at least incrementally, the data we have on non-traditional student outcomes. This post was first published on the ACCN blog – we are so very thankful to Christina for allowing us to share it with you.

IPEDS Changes Will Improve Available Data on Non-traditional Students, yet a Comprehensive Picture Remains Elusive

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is the primary source for data on colleges, universities, and technical and vocational postsecondary institutions in the United States. The system is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and provides publically available data on all postsecondary institutions which participate in federal student financial aid programs. NCES collects data on a variety of topics—such as enrollments, institutional prices and graduation rates—from institutions through a system of interrelated surveys. While IPEDS contains a wealth of information and serves as an important resource, it has long had a serious drawback for those interested in returning adult students. Critical topics such as graduation and retention rates have been calculated using only “first-time, full-time” students, excluding those with prior college credit who return to complete a credential. However, NCES will implement a new Outcome Measures component including non-first-time and part-time students in their 2015-2016 Winter data collection.

The addition of the Outcome Measures comes after the U.S. Department of Education’s Committee on Measures of Student Success’ 2011 recommendation that IPEDS “broaden the coverage of student graduation data to reflect the diverse student populations at two-year institutions.” The U.S Department of Education responded with the release of an action plan to improve its measures of postsecondary success (at both two- and four-year institutions). The department then convened a series of Technical Review Panels (TRPs) to develop proposed changes to the IPEDS data collection process, solicited public comments on the TRP recommendations, and ultimately received clearance to implement the new Outcome Measures in the 2015-2016 data collection.

Two- and four-year degree-granting institutions will report on four cohorts in the new Outcome Measures survey: first-time, full-time students; first-time, part-time students; non-first-time, full-time students; and non-first-time, part-time students. The inaugural survey will have institutions report on the outcomes of degree/certificate-seeking students in each of these cohorts who entered school in 2007 after six years (2013) and eight years (2015).

The Outcome Measures will track whether students: received an award within six years, received an award with eight years, are still enrolled at their initial institution, are enrolled at another institution, or have an unknown enrollment status.

The survey will not track the type of award received by the student (i.e. bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree, or certificate), nor will it track transfer type (i.e. not differentiating between a two-year to four-year “upward” transfer and a two-year to two-year “lateral” transfer). The data will also not be disaggregated by student characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or gender – therefore, presumably also not by age.

It is also important to note that the new Outcome Measures function as a supplement to existing IPEDS data—not as a revision to their methodology for calculating graduation rates—though some groups have suggested that aligning the Outcome Measures with IPEDS graduation and retention rate components might reduce the reporting burden on institutions and produce more consistent, comprehensive data. An in-depth look at this viewpoint is available in a 2014 report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

IPEDS expects the first round of Outcome Measures data to be available around mid-September 2016 in the IPEDS Data Center. At the institution level, data will appear in the: College Navigator Website, IPEDS Data Center, IPEDS Data Feedback Reports, and the College Affordability and Transparency Center Website. At the aggregate level, data will appear in: IPEDS First Looks, IPEDS Table Library, IPEDS Data Feedback Reports, The Digest of Education Statistics, and The Condition of Education.

As the Outcome Measures data are being gathered, it is worth noting that a series of voluntary data collection initiatives, such as the Student Achievement Measure (SAM), the Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA), Complete College America, and Access to Success, already exist to provide a nuanced view of how various groups of postsecondary students are faring. Moreover, many states have the capability of analyzing the success of the non-traditional students enrolled in their public institutions through their various Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) projects, which include unit-level data. To capitalize on and complement states’ SLDS investments, WICHE is leading a Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange effort that will account for students who cross state lines during or after their college experiences.

These voluntary initiatives are providing valuable insight into many important aspects of higher education. Yet many experts believe that to capture a comprehensive picture of the nation’s evolving postsecondary student population a federal student unit record system is necessary. Though currently prohibited by law, a recent white paper released by Senator Lamar Alexander—chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee—raised the possibility of a federal student unit record system. This hints at an increasing openness to the idea at the Congressional level with the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act on the horizon.

Despite uncertainty over the possibility of a federal student unit record system and the limitations of the new IPEDS Outcome Measures, the level of discussion around the importance of non-traditional student data is encouraging. With this increasing dialogue, growing participation in voluntary data initiatives, and the emergence of new resources such as the Non-First-Time Student dataset, it is clear that stakeholders are beginning to recognize the important role that adult students play—and will continue to play—in the higher education sector and the accompanying need for more inclusive data systems.

Christina Sedney
Project Coordinator,
Adult College Completion Network, WICHE

Completion, Credentials, IPEDS, WICHE

Practice

A Survey of Practices in Supporting Online Adjunct Faculty

By WCET Frontiers

November 5, 2015

Are colleges doing all they can to assure that their online adjunct faculty are successful?

Institutions employing adjunct faculty for online courses were surveyed about the practices they use in supporting them. With the frequent use of adjuncts and growing enrollments in online education, adjunct faculty importance in the academic community is increasing. To properly support them, we sought advice on successful practices used by institutions in recruiting, orienting, and supporting these faculty.

WCET is pleased to have partnered with The Learning House, Inc. to have conducted this study over the summer. While full survey results will be released at next week’s WCET Annual Meeting, this post gives you a taste of some of a few of our findings and tells you about next steps.

Change in Percentage of Online Adjunct Faculty in the Last Year

In 2012, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce published seminal research that provided “A Portrait of Part Time Faculty Members“. There surveys showed that roughly half of all instructors in higher education were adjunct or part-time faculty members.

We were curious about recent growth in online adjunct faculty over the past year. The responses reflected in the chart show that more than half of the institutions increased the number of adjuncts, and one-quarter increased.

While we do not have base numbers for the number of online adjunct faculty, these trends show significant growth. They also underline the importance of having good practices in on-boarding and supporting these faculty.

Level of Customization Permitted in Courses Taught by Online Adjuncts

Some colleges expect the adjunct faculty person to develop their courses from scratch. Others provide a “master course” with all the lessons intact and allow very little customization of the course. This question addresses two very different models of how institutions interact with their adjunct faculty. For institutions that expect faculty to develop their own course, it raises expectations of additional support to help those faculty be successful.

More than half of the respondents either expect faculty to design their own courses or allow for complete customization. Just under one-quarter of respondents allowed minimal or no customization. When you see the final report, one of our main recommendations is to: “choose a model for course design and fully develop it.” We became concerned that it appeared that some colleges expected the faculty to develop courses, but provided little or no help for them.

Limits on the Number of Courses Taught by Online Adjuncts

Administrators are very aware of the impact of crossing the part-time vs. full-time threshold in employing faculty. While there were probably other reasons (quality, accreditation concerns, etc.) for limiting the number of courses taught, the few administrators who participated in verbal interviews with us were quite aware of the full-time status.

Just under one-quarter (21%), have no limits. While the rest had limits, some of their limits were so high that they may have unwittingly passed the full-time threshold.

What’s Next?

These are just a few of the findings that will be released next week. We invite you to learn more:

Watch for the full release of the report on November 12. WCET members and Learning House constituents will receive notices. If you would like to receive the notice, you can pre-register to receive a copy. We will also post the link to the final survey as a comment to this blog post.
Attend the WCET Annual Meeting session (November 12 at 3:00 pm) in which we will talk about the results.
Participate in a free webcast to discuss the results on December 3 at 2:00 Eastern time.

Thank You!
It has been great working with The Learning House crew on this survey. Thank you to Andrew Magda for his tireless work and to Dave Clinefelter for his keen insights. Thank you to Cali Morrison (WCET) and Wendy Parrish (The Learning House) for their support throughout the process.

Russ

Russ Poulin
Director, Policy & Analysis
WCET – WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies
rpoulin@wiche.edu

Support our work. Join WCET.

Faculty, Online Learning, Research, Survey, Teaching, WCET, WCET Annual Conference

Practice

Making a Business Case for Joining or Not Joining SARA

By WCET Frontiers

October 14, 2015

1 Comment

To join or not to join…. that is the question. The answer, like everything else related to state authorization is….it depends! This blog post will identify the factors that an institution faces in making that choice.

Begin with Internal Analysis

Each institution must look at its own institution’s out of state activities and then analyze the costs to decide if the scale will tip toward being a member of SARA or not being a member of SARA. The bottom line is a cost/benefit analysis.

Regular readers of this blog will recall that the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) was created to provide a more uniform list of activities for which an institution may participate without applying for authorization in the SARA states. While SARA does offer a more consistent path to state compliance for many institutions that manage out of state activities, not all activities are subject to SARA purview. Additionally, while the list of SARA Member States is growing, not all states belong to SARA. It should be noted that institutions that join SARA could be managing authorization through SARA and through traditional authorization pathways at the same time depending on the activity and the state for which the activity is taking place.

Understand the Costs of Joining SARA

In considering SARA membership there is still a cost. A membership to SARA requires a national fee of $2,000-$6,000, depending on the institution’s FTE. Some states are imposing an additional fee to the institutions above the national fee. These state fees range from negligible to quite high. A SARA institution may find that there will be a national fee, state fee, and compliance fees to some non-SARA states depending on the location and type of out of state activities of the institution.

Review Your Institution’s Current and Desired Out-of-State Activity and Where

An institution’s analysis of out of state activity is likely familiar to most institutions. This was a first step in state authorization management to determine the institution’s footprint outside of the institution’s home state. A careful analysis of the institution will result in responses to the following non-exhaustive list of things to be considered:

Where are students participating in online courses?
Where are students participating in field experiences (i.e., practicum, internships, externships etc.)?…..including experiences stemming from a face to face program in the home state.
Does the institution market/advertise out of state? Direct marketing or National advertising?
Does the institution hire faculty who provide online services from another state?
Does the institution have a physical location in another state? …for instruction, administrative offices, or other support services?

Determine Whether Your Institution’s Activities are Covered by SARA

When considering SARA for an institution, one should carefully read the full Policies and Standards document for SARA. Generally speaking, online courses, field experiences, online faculty, marketing, and recruiting are all activities subject to SARA purview and therefore do not require a SARA institution to follow the state’s traditional authorization process if the activity takes place in a SARA state. Activities not described in the Policies and Standard document as “covered” by SARA, are subject to the traditional authorization process. For example, a SARA institution will not be deemed compliant through SARA membership in another SARA state if the institution requires students to meet in person for monthly face to face group sessions related to an online course. This monthly face to face activity is not among the activities permitted through SARA and therefore the institution will be required to pursue the specific state’s authorization process or be subject to consequences for not being properly authorized in that state.

Be Aware of Fee Structures for States Where Your Institution’s Activities Occur

As of this date, there are 29 member states in SARA with several more expected to join by the end of the calendar year. Managing SARA authorization in member states and seeking traditional authorization in other states comes with a price. Remaining a Non-SARA institution also comes with a price. You should note that several SARA states changed their fee structure to manage Non-SARA institutions after their state joined SARA. Please review the state process changes for states such as Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Oregon and more. Regulations in each state are still going through revisions and must be reviewed on a regular basis.

Chart and Calculate

Not only should an institution analyze the amount of activity and where, but also analyze the annual cost. I suggest a chart that compares the institution’s annual costs as a SARA institution and the annual costs as a Non SARA institution.

The institution should add:

NC-SARA fee + State fee (if any) + fees in any non-SARA state where a fee is imposed for your institution’s activities.

Compare that total to the costs to remain a Non-SARA institution by calculating:

All fees and related costs (bonds, travel to the state for meetings, etc.) imposed by all states that your institution participates in activities.

Variables such as staff time required to manage state authorization (research & reporting), ability to market programs across more states, and the number of students who are impacted are also considerations to the basic equation.

Perhaps your institution is similar to one of the following scenarios when calculating and comparing annual compliance costs:

Result

So, how does the scale tip for your institution? As you see, the institution must determine its own financial benefit and whether that benefit coordinates with an institution’s out of state activity goals. An institution with a small presence outside of their home state will find it financially prudent to only seek the compliance process of the few states the institution finds necessary to pursue. However, SARA can provide a more concise path for state compliance IF the institution is seeking a way to effectively manage compliance in many states.

The Bottom Line

Although we would all prefer an easy process that that will rid institutions of the need to actively manage state authorization compliance, there is no magic process. To join SARA or not to join SARA is a question that requires you to continue to review and assess the types of out of state activities, locations, and the goals of your institution to understand the institution’s compliance requirements. After that review and assessment is completed, your institution can determine and compare the costs and plans to accomplish these needs. The State Authorization Network is available to support your institution in your research and best practices to help manage compliance through SARA, through traditional individual state compliance, and a combination of both! The good work continues!

Cheryl Dowd
Director, State Authorization Network
WCET

Graphic Credit: OpenClipart

Reciprocity, SARA, State Authorization, WCET, WICHE

Practice

Progress on New Federal Electronic Instructional Materials Accessibility Legislation

By WCET Frontiers

September 21, 2015

In today’s blog post, we have a conversation with Jarret Cummings, EDUCAUSE’s Director of Policy and External Relations. Jarret has helped lead negotiations on new federal legislation that would facilitate the development of voluntary accessibility guidelines for electronic instructional materials and related technologies in higher education. We thank Jarret for this update as part of a series of webcasts and blogs during WCET’s accessibility month.

Russ Poulin: Jarret, you’ve been part of the ongoing discussions regarding the accessibility of educational technologies in higher education. EDUCAUSE, your organization, the American Council on Education, and other higher education associations have been working with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) on new legislation. The discussions seek to find a compromise position among organizations with diverse constituencies on the development of voluntary accessibility guidelines for postsecondary electronic instructional materials and related technologies. What started this process and how has it unfolded?

Jarret Cummings: Thank you for inviting me to discuss this, Russ. I really appreciate it. In terms of the genesis of the process, NFB and AAP began collaborating in 2012 on a bill that they named the Technology, Equality, and Accessibility in College and Higher Education—or TEACH Act. It was an outcome of the Postsecondary Accessible Instructional Materials Commission that Congress chartered under the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. That Commission looked at instructional considerations related to higher education and developed some recommendations.

One of the Commission’s recommendations was that the federal government foster the development of voluntary accessibility guidelines for instructional materials in the postsecondary space. Following the release of the Commission’s report, NFB and AAP started working on a bill to implement that recommendation. They were able to have the bill introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in late 2013 and subsequently in the U.S. Senate early last year. EDUCAUSE, along with a number of other higher education associations, took a look at the proposal and felt that it actually would not lead to the voluntary guidelines it was intended to produce. We chartered an expert analysis to determine if those concerns were valid, and it confirmed the problems we thought we saw in the bill.

When we started sharing the results of our analysis with the broader higher education community and others, we unfortunately ran into some miscommunication with NFB and AAP about the nature of our concerns. We were trying to get across that we shared the goals of the original legislation, but didn’t think the bill, as then constructed, would lead to workable, voluntary guidelines. Once we got past that initial miscommunication, we were able to sit down with NFB and AAP and agree to work together on a joint bill that would establish a process for developing the guidelines that all three communities could support.

On behalf of a number of other higher education associations, a small team from ACE and EDUCAUSE has been working with NFB and AAP representatives since late last year to develop a joint legislative proposal. We started by developing a shared concept outline for the bill, which we finished earlier this summer, shared with a range of stakeholder groups, and then revised based on their feedback. Since late July we’ve been working on translating that concept outline into an actual bill. The process is well underway; we’re actively working on edits as we speak. Hopefully, we will be able to release a public draft of the bill later this fall.

Russ: I’m taken by the term “voluntary” guidelines. Why have those negotiating the bill focused on “voluntary” guidelines and how do those organizations see those guidelines coming together?

Jarret: I think AAP and NFB focused their initial legislative proposal on voluntary guidelines because they recognized how fluid and complicated a space this is. As you know, the range of disciplines and pedagogical considerations that electronic instructional materials and related technologies must address in higher education is extremely broad as well as extremely deep. A rigid regulatory approach to try to advance accessibility in that context would likely generate significant unintended consequences that could limit the availability and effectiveness of teaching and learning with technology for all students, including students with disabilities.

So, on the higher education side, we thought the original idea that NFB and AAP had about addressing these issues through voluntary guidelines was a good one. In our view, voluntary guidelines would raise awareness and inform decision-making while also preserving institutional flexibility to meet students’ unique needs.

Taking that as our starting point, AAP and NFB joined us in agreeing that the process needed to be more clearly stakeholder-led and stakeholder-driven. One reason this matters from a higher education perspective is that any discussion of instructional materials and technologies necessarily involves pedagogy. The higher education community wanted to make sure that the process for producing effective voluntary guidelines wouldn’t negatively impact institutional oversight of the teaching and learning mission, which the federal government has long agreed should remain higher education’s responsibility. A stakeholder-led process with equal representation from higher education leadership ensures that the guidelines will develop in a balanced, well-informed context, which will also ensure that institutions genuinely have the flexibility they need to meet student needs to the extent they reasonably can.

Russ: Given that negotiations are still ongoing, what else can you say about what we’re likely to see in the bill that will be submitted to Congress?

Jarret: I think the most important point about the bill is that it isn’t intended to set the voluntary guidelines itself. Rather, it’s designed to create a process for developing voluntary guidelines for postsecondary instructional materials and related technologies that the major stakeholder groups involved can all agree will successfully do that. As envisioned, it asks Congress to charter an independent commission with equal representation from the disability advocacy community, publishers and technology producers, and the higher education community. The resulting commission will have about 18 months to two years to produce guidelines with the support of a technical expert panel, which itself will also have equal representation from each community.

Another important aspect of the process is that the guidelines will not recreate the wheel when it comes to IT accessibility standards. There are already well-established national and international standards, such as for web accessibility. We don’t need to develop general IT accessibility standards specific to higher education. If anything, that would probably severely complicate the ability of higher education to produce accessible environments because the marketplace for digital content and technologies is quite large. In some sense, when you think about the overall market for publishing and technology, higher education is not that big a piece of the pie. Separating higher education off into its own sphere, specifically for technology accessibility, would probably be fairly detrimental to us all, because it would limit the applicability of materials, technologies, and innovations in the broader market to higher education, and vice versa. All of the groups realize that there are aspects of pedagogy that might lead to considerations about accessibility that fall between the gaps of these general standards. The idea is that the commission will look at these general IT accessibility standards in relation to pedagogical needs and concerns and develop voluntary guidelines to help institutions, publishers, and technology producers bridge those gaps.

I think another benefit of the process is that the bill will call for the commission to leverage its review of those general standards to also produce a reference list of general IT accessibility standards. Included will be notes for institutions on how those standards might apply to specific needs in the higher education context.

Russ: These efforts all arose out of a concerns regarding how well colleges serve students with disabilities. In focusing on those students, how will these guidelines benefit them and the institutions that serve them?

Jarret: I think the guidelines will give institutions, as well as publishers and technology providers, more information with which to address accessibility needs in relation to teaching and learning in higher education. Current law recognizes that not all disability needs can be addressed in a general manner, given the unique requirements that an individual disability may pose in a given context. This is especially true in relation to a particular discipline, how that discipline is taught, and what materials and technologies are used to support that teaching and learning process.

So, in short, the guidelines will help institutions make decisions about adopting materials and technologies that take accessibility into account to the extent possible, which in turn will better enable institutions to help students with disabilities achieve their academic goals.

Russ: Great! Do you have any recommendations about what colleges should be doing now or how they can keep updated on the progress of your joint proposal?

Jarret: First, I would encourage everyone to participate in the EDUCAUSE Live! webinar that I’m conducting on September 22nd with my colleague Jon Fansmith from ACE. We’re going to discuss the current state of the process in greater detail and what we think the likely outcomes are.

I also provide updates via the Policy Spotlight blog on the EDUCAUSE Review website. Those updates cover major developments in the process and, as I mentioned earlier, we’re hopeful that later this fall we’ll actually have a public draft of the bill to share. Once we do, the Policy Spotlight blog is probably one of the first places that information will become available.

In terms of what institutions should be doing now, I think it’s important for institutions to assess the accessibility of their technology environment generally and on a regular basis to make sure that they’re in compliance with current law and regulation. Institutional personnel may want to look at some of the consent agreements that other colleges have entered into with the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice and groups like NFB to help inform their thinking. The background slides for a panel on “accessibility in the cloud” that I moderated at the 2015 Internet2 Global Summit highlight a few examples. I would also encourage anyone with questions about how to assess their institution’s approach to IT accessibility to get in touch with the EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Constituent Group. Group members are IT accessibility professionals representing a wide range of colleges and universities, and they’re always happy to help colleagues at other institutions.

Russ: WCET can also help with that as we’re set to host a webcast on September 29 about “turning a negative into a positive.” Accessibility leaders who helped Penn State University (although he’s now at Rutgers) and the University of Montana in creating new strategies to serve disabled students will give their advice on what colleges should be doing.

Jarret: That’s great – Penn State and Montana have been very proactive since they came to fully understand the issues that led to their consent agreements. I think they’ve really embodied the spirit that higher education generally is striving to achieve in this area. By and large, institutions involved in consent agreements just didn’t have a complete awareness of the nature of their accessibility problems and what those problems meant for their students. Once they did, they’ve generally taken the responsibility to address those problems very seriously, and others can learn a great deal from their example.

Russ: Agreed. Jarret, on behalf of our members, thank you for your work in negotiating the new bill. And thank you for updating us on its current progress. We look forward to hearing more in the future.

Jarret Cummings

Director, Policy and External Relations
EDUCAUSE

Photo Credit: Anita Hart

Accessibility, Digital Learning, Disabilities, Distance Education

IPEDS Changes Will Improve Available Data on Non-traditional Students, yet a Comprehensive Picture Remains Elusive ­­

IPEDS Changes Will Improve Available Data on Non-traditional Students, yet a Comprehensive Picture Remains Elusive