Reform | edCircuit

MOOC Town Hall Today!

EdCircuit StaffMay 5, 201500 views

MOOCs: A Revolutionary PerspectiveJoin us for an online Town Hall with Gordon Rogers on Wednesday May 6th from 10:00am – 11:00am ESTA number of parallels exist between the new frontier of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their recognition as “academic currency” and the fate of the doomed Continental, the currency of the American colonies. Just as the revolutionary banknotes lacked credibility, the assessment instruments used by students to prove knowledge and mastery of MOOCs continue to face an uphill battle for authenticity. Until these issues are overcome, online education will be, in the eyes of many, “not worth a Continental”.But efforts are underway to achieve wider recognition and acceptance of alternative forms of credentialing. They are taking place in universities, community colleges and coding “boot-camps.” They generally fall into a framework known as “Competency Based Education” (CBE), representing the first significant step in the unbundling of American higher education. Reinventing a credentialing system that has remain largely unchanged for a century is not going to happen in a semester, but cracks are beginning to appear in the ivory tower’s foundation. Gordon Rogers, a 25-year veteran in the field of digital education and learning management, will talk about the “unbundling” trend in education and what it means for students, business and the academic world.

David Greene: “The Wizard of Albany”

David GreeneApril 30, 2015031 views

David Greene shares that former NY Governor Cuomo’s education policies fly in the face of what experts cite as elements for successful schools.

All of the Testing, None of the Guilt

EdCircuit StaffApril 14, 2015132 views

Call it “No Child Left Behind-Lite,” but if it passes, The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 would still pack enough calorie-rich standardized testing to weigh down what education should be. If you like the passive-aggressive nature of the federal government’s healthcare law, you’re going to love the latest proposed NCLB-revision bill in the Senate. If you like your test scores, you can keep your test scores, because the federal government doesn’t want them. In fact, under this bill, the federal government would still mandate yearly testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school, as it did under NCLB, but it won’t tell the states how to use the scores it collects. Under the old NCLB, schools were required to use these scores to meet AYP, or “adequate yearly progress,” or face sanctions as severe as eventual shutdown.