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LEARNING OUTCOMES "TRANSPARENCY" AND WHAT IT COULD MEAN FOR
DISTANCE EDUCATION PROVIDERS
by George Lorenzo
I was somewhat bewildered
after reading both the recent Spellings Commission’s draft
on the future of higher education, along with the President
of the American Council on Education David Ward’s reaction
to the draft.
It was stated early in the draft that the Spellings
commissioners, of which Ward is a member, "did not agree
unanimously on every single finding and recommendation. . .
Nevertheless, there has been remarkable consensus among our
members not only on what is wrong with the nation’s colleges
and universities but also on how we can begin to fix those
weaknesses . . ."
Less than a week after the draft was made public, Ward
wrote that although some press reports characterized the
draft as reflecting the input of Commission members—"nothing
could be further from the truth. The reality is this draft
was prepared by Commission staff based on a highly selective
reading of testimony and without the slightest input of
Commission members."
How could that be? Or, if the Commission’s findings were
on target, how much does it matter?
Perplexing Conclusions and Findings
The Commission was charged by the Secretary of
Education to examine access, affordability, quality, and
accountability. The draft claims to be a result of the
Commission’s year-long examination into these areas of
concern. Ward said if the Commission wishes to ultimately
publish a constructive report that will stimulate college
and university presidents to tackle issues effectively,
"this draft fails that critical test."
The draft is definitely scathing, as it lists a very high
number of negative conclusions and findings about the state
of higher education as it exists today, such as:
- Access to higher
education is "unduly limited."
- High school graduates
are not prepared for college-level work, plus secondary
school teachers and higher education faculty "differ
significantly in their assessment of students’ readiness
for college-level work."
- The "inexorable"
increases in college costs are alarming.
- College and universities
do not have enough incentives to control costs.
- Student learning is
inadequate and declining.
- Federal and state
policies are "failing to provide financial and
logistical support for lifelong learning," as well as
"failing to craft flexible credit systems that allow
students to move easily between different kinds of
institutions."
- Most institutions have
not put enough serious effort into measuring what their
students learn.
- Higher education is not
being innovative enough and is not successful at
teaching students of all ages core skills that today’s
employers are seeking.
The aforementioned barely scratches the surface level of
blistering fault-findings in higher education that were
listed inside the Commission’s draft.
How Much Do We Know?
"Where the Commission
is coming from basically is that we know collectively as a
nation, or as institutions, or as a government, very little
about the performance and costs of our universities," said
Robert Mendenhall, Commission member and president of
Western Governors University. Mendenhall pointed out that
some of the data sources that consumers rely on for
information about higher education today, such as the
U.S. News and World Report, are based on the wrong
incentives. "They award more points the more exclusive you
are and the more money you spend per student. These are the
opposite of expanding access and improving costs, which is,
as a higher education system, what we need to be doing."
Mendenhall added that consumers don’t know enough about
what kind of higher education they are paying for. "We (the
Commission) would like to see something similar to a
Consumer Reports that actually looks at the cost of an
education and the value of learning that happens at
institutions." Mendenhall claimed that the U.S. Department
of Education knows a lot about first-time,
first-institution, traditional-aged students, but nothing
about all of the other students enrolled in colleges and
universities across the nation, who make up the vast
majority of higher education enrollments. "The minute
students transfer, we have no way of tracking them across
institutions," he explained. "We don’t know if they graduate
or don’t graduate (nor how much they learn)."
Need for More Transparency
These kinds of
discussions and reporting basically revolve around the
notion of establishing more "transparency" in higher
education. In other words, there needs to be more public
information developed about the real cost and value of what
a college or university offers its students, at least at a
base level of understanding. That information also needs to
be benchmarked effectively between institutions. "For the
most part, it is in the institutions’ best interest to do
this," says Mendenhall. "Both federal and state governments
are increasingly reluctant to spend money on higher
education. A college education is still a great investment,
but it is losing public support because it is becoming a
black hole that you pore money into without knowing what you
get for it."
How Distance Ed Providers Can Lead
Of all the
transparent data that can be collected by any one
institution, perhaps the most important set, at least in
terms of real student value and institutional
accountability, should qualify and quantify student
learning; i.e., what are the learning outcomes?
In late March of this year, Excelsior College in Albany,
NY held a President’s Forum that was billed as "a dialogue
among leaders in higher education to move from policy to
practice in an online learning environment." One of the
roundtable discussion topics was titled "Learning Outcomes
Transparency: Leading the Way to Accountability," led by
Capella University President Michael Offerman.
Reacting to the Spellings Commission draft and other
criticisms related to higher education’s lack of
transparency, Offerman, in a recent post-President’s-Forum
interview with Educational Pathways, said that "the
accountability of higher education is not where it needs to
be. There is a lot of talk about inputs, but there is very
little talk about whether or not learning really occurs. We
can resist this pressure, or we can figure out how to deal
with it —and
online institutions are in a particularly powerful position
to respond meaningfully and quickly."
Clearer Articulations
Both Offerman and
Mendenhall believe that online institutions, as a sector,
tend to lean more toward clear articulation of learning
outcomes then the rest of higher education. "We go through
such a production of intellectual property that is in a
fixed form," said Offerman. "We go through an intentional
effort to define what the learning materials will be, what
the exercises will be, and they are designed to be more
outcomes based. Then you add the fact that we have this huge
amount of rich data that exceeds anything you get in a
traditional classroom because we are literally interacting
in a digital environment . . . So, we know when the learner
is in the course and what external links he or she is going
to. Plus, if we get serious about these outcomes we have
articulated, we should be able to track whether or not
students are becoming proficient in them."
Solutions?
Offerman and
Mendenhall pointed to the National Association of State
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges’ (NASULGC) recent work
to develop accountability systems to collect and report more
data. NASULGC published a discussion paper in early April
that explored the current state of accountability at
four-year institutions and some possible approaches,
including the creation of a system of accountability that
would "allow for differentiation by type or classification
of university or college." In early July, NASULGC came out
with a second "discussion draft," that suggested "a
reasonable and helpful set of accountability measures for
universities," containing "three elements of accountability
data: consumer data, campus climate or student engagement
data, and educational outcome measurements."
Offerman explained that establishing these types of
accountability measures, particularly by "type or
classification," could be a highly complex endeavor that
could take a very long time. "We (online institutions),
however, could come up with something, at least at the
surface, that is simple," he said. "We can say that we are
committing to telling the public about the program-level
outcomes that we believe that we offer, and here is how we
measure those outcomes. And it has to be described in a
common language; it cannot be in an academic, esoteric
language - for example, here is our categorization scheme; X
percent of our learners are demonstrating high proficiency;
Y percent are not about to demonstrate proficiency. The
point is you would not have a common definition, but you
would have a common approach that every institution could
sign on to."
Offerman also mentioned that both eCollege and Blackboard
were both working on the development of a sophisticated tool
that could easily extract out and aggregate learning
outcomes data on multiple levels (see brief article in this
issue, "Online Learning Support Vendors Work on Developing
Tools for Tracking and Reporting on Learning Outcomes.")
The Overriding Concern
"The concern is that
the federal government is going to mandate something (that
forces higher education to be more accountable)," said
Mendenhall. "Institutions do not want to see that happen
because whenever the federal government demands something,
it turns out to be very expensive to provide as well as
being the wrong information. If institutions step up and
provide good information on their own, the government won’t
step in."
References:
Secretary of
Education’s [Margaret Spellings] Commission on the Future of
Higher Education, "Commission Report 6/22/06 Draft,"
www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/report.pdf.
David Ward, "Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher
Education Releases Draft Report, American Council on
Education’s President to President, Vol 7, No. 22
(June 27, 2006),
www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Previous_Issues&CONTENTID=17297&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm
President’s Forum of Excelsior College 2006,
http://presidentsforum.excelsior.edu.
Peter McPherson and David Shulenburger, "Improving
Student Learning in Higher Education Through Better
Accountability and Assessment: A Discussion Paper for the
National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant
Colleges," (April 7, 2006),
www.nasulgc.org/Accountability_DiscussionPaper_NASULGC.pdf.
Peter McPherson and David Shulenburger, "Elements of
Accountability for Public Universities and Colleges,"
National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant
Colleges, (July 6, 2006),
www.nasulgc.org/Accountability_DiscussionPaper_Revised_NASULGC.pdf. |
