Accreditation

We’ve had plenty of talking and blogging about open certification or open credentialing of learning mediated by open educational resources. One thing I don’t think we’ve talked about yet is the role of openness and open educational resources on program accreditation. When you think about what accreditors want, they want to know exactly what your program is doing, exactly how you’re doing it, how you’re capturing data, how you’re using that data to make your program better, etc. Basically, accreditors are interested in transparency and accountability. Can you think of a better way to create and facilitate transparency and accountability than putting all your department’s courses in OCW and taking pro-open stance on other department output like research publications and policy documents? A few questions: ...

Lots more great discussion on the open education accreditation front! Including posts from Steve Carson (Borderlines) about the interface between the various functioning pieces of higher ed, Antonio writing about why we shouldn’t view the homemade certificate as a “sacrilegious contamination between two worlds, formal and informal” education, and Tannis wondering about how a few historical models of accreditation might inform our current thinking. I hope all this interesting thinking and writing continues… We’re right at the tipping point (you might say precipice). =)

There have been some good comments on my post from yesterday, and interesting posts elsewhere around the net. I realized I needed to clarify my model a bit after reading Stephen’s comment: A slightly different model has emerged in George’s and my Connectivism course. We have the 20 for-credit students at the University of Manitoba, and the open access students. We’ve published the details of all the assignments. We had a student who signed on as an open access student but who would be submitting her assignments at her home institution, for assessment there. This distributes assessment, allowing for assessment to be basically open-sourced. ...

D’Arcy had a great post tonight about the three parts of open education. It validates something I’ve been wondering to myself about for a while. While I use slightly different language, you can me my take on the three toward the end of my Open Ed 2008 General Session presentation (start at slide 100): Ten Years of Open Content View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: history content) ...