July-August 07, Vol. 6, Issue 7

WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY: HOW COMPETENCY-BASED DISTANCE EDUCATION HAS COME OF AGE
A relatively large and far-reaching group of educators, government officials and corporate leaders have helped shape the success of Western Governors University (WGU). Born out of a brainstorming discussion in 1995 between governors from the Western Governors Association, WGU is the only regionally accredited and very first NCATE accredited higher education institution in the country that offers only distance-education, competency-based degree programs. Basically, WGU students earn their degrees by passing assessments, unlike traditional higher education where students must complete a specific number of credit hours to earn a degree. WGU occupies the top three floors on an eight-story business office building located in Salt Lake City, Utah and has more than 390 off-site and on-site employees. WGU did not officially start until the summer of 1999, offering seven degree programs in business, information technology and education. By February 2003, WGU had 500 students. Today there are more than 8,000 students enrolled in 46 undergraduate and graduate competency-based degree programs, which includes four degrees offered through a new College of Health Professions that launched in Fall 2006. MORE

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A WGU ELEMENTARY EDUCATION MENTOR
At age 45, Roberta Ross-Fisher has achieved a good number of important career milestones, all very much related to education. She has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education; a master’s degree in K-12 reading; a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction; and has taught at the K-12 level for 16 years - "everything from kindergarten to the fourth grade, to Title I reading, to gifted students, to working with adolescents for their GEDs," she says. Additionally, Ross-Fisher has served as an associate professor, chair of a teacher education program and dean of an extension campus for Missouri Baptist University. Such impressive credentials have served her well, as well as a good number of students at WGU, for the past 19 months, since she became an elementary education mentor for WGU’s Teachers College, a job that she loves. MORE

ABOUT WGU'S TEACHERS COLLEGE
Janet Schnitz, executive director of the Teachers College, notes that achieving NCATE accreditation definitely enhanced the credibility of the WGU Teachers College. Educators across the country now recognize that an institution such as WGU, with a unique and different teaching and learning approach, can, indeed, meet NCATE standards. "Distance learning has reached a point of maturity that has made it acceptable," Schnitz says, adding that gaining NCATE accreditation has helped to open a door for the next level of online learning innovation to move forward. MORE

WGU LEARNING RESOURCES AND THE SELF-DIRECTED STUDENT
Ironically, the most successful students at WGU are those who work well with accessing and utilizing the many independent (also referred to as "individualized") learning resources that WGU provides, not the students who rely on taking the instructor-led online courses offered by institutional partners. MORE

ePORTFOLIO TOOL DELIVERS EFFICIENT
 PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM
The Teachers College uses TaskStream as a highly efficient way to deliver performance assessments that students respond to online and where graders access the student’s work online. Performance assessments are located throughout the so-called "domains" and "subdomains" of every education program in the Teachers College, and they all contain multiple tasks, such as scored assignments, projects, essays and research papers. Each task also contains a grading rubric. Having students submit their completed tasks into their ePortfolios for archiving and grading has eliminated the need to e-mail tasks to students individually and then parcel the student’s work out to individual graders MORE

TALKING WITH RUKI JAYARAMAN, WGU'S IT PROGRAMS DIRECTOR
To get a sense for what’s going on in WGU’s College of Information Technology, Educational Pathways talked with IT Programs Director Ruki Jayaraman. The College of Information Technology offers six BS degrees and participates in the WGU MBA program that offers an emphasis in information technology management. About 1,350 students are enrolled in the College of Information Technology, which is in the process of developing two new graduate-level programs, one with an emphasis in enterprise data architecture and the other with an emphasis in database security and standards. MORE