e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Association of American Colleges and Universities

  • Outcomes-Based Education and the Conservative Radicalism of the AAC&U

    I have been invited to participate on the Digital Working Group of the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U’s) General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) program. (As we will see, AAC&U loves its acronyms.) GEMs is a really interesting project made even more interesting because of who is doing it. AAC&U is a fundamentally conservative organization in the sense that their purview is to help conserve that which is valuable and distinctive about the American college education. GEMs is part of a larger alphabet soup of AAC&U initiatives that are clearly about outcomes-based education and arguably about competency-based education (CBE). (For more on the distinction between these two, see Phil’s earlier blog post on the subject.) The organization’s leadership is frank about the fact that these have been at least partly defensive moves; given all the pressure for increasing accountability, the Association felt that academics should lead the charge on defining what that should mean before others define it for them. (GEMs is the latest in a series of related efforts to that end.) But the trail they are blazing has the potential to be pretty radical. Maybe even more radical than the organization has fully come to grips with.

    I’m going to be doing some of my homework for the working group here on the blog in future posts, but before I do that, I’d like to take the time in this one to outline what I understand to be the goal and context of GEMs. Fair warning: I’m not sure that my understanding is correct. I am new to AAC&U and, to be honest, they were not terribly good at articulating the goals for GEMs at the first summit. (I am not the only participant who had trouble parsing the goals and priorities.) With any luck, some AAC&U veterans will read this and correct any mistakes I make along the way.

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  • Gen Ed and Competency-Based Education

    Inside Higher Ed has a write-up today on an effort by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to develop a competency-based framework for general education called General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), funded by a multi-million-dollar Gates Foundation grant. I am honored to report that I have been invited to participate on one of the GEMs committees.

    To be honest, I have mixed feelings about competency-based education (CBE). On the one hand, I do think that an earnest attempt to have a norming conversation and set some standards for what we hope students will learn at college is very important and badly overdue. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to apply CBE in a mechanistic and reductive way that ignores the important but hard-to-measure skills precisely because they’re hard to measure. It’s essentially the same worry that a number of readers expressed in the comments on my post about Pearson’s efficacy initiative. That said, AAC&U has a good shot at assembling the right stakeholders to grapple with this complexity appropriately. I do think there are models out there. For example, ASU’s Habitable Worlds class, which is both competency-based and mastery-based, is not at all dumbed down and could even be further expanded to include writing and similar open-ended analytic and communications skills. (I interviewed Habitable Worlds co-creator Ariel Anbar last year.) But there are many challenges.

    Anyway, the first meeting of the GEMs group is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know what I think after spending a couple of days talking about the issues with the working group.