Different blogs have reflected on David Wiley’s blog posts about open teaching and accreditation, namely ”More on the three parts of open education” and “Open accreditation“. Excerpts from the blogs.
David Wiley-
This disaggregation is already happening, and higher education will just pull itself apart faster and faster in the future. Whenever a business function can be separated and specialized in, that business function is destined to be either spun off or outsourced.
Maybe instead of hacking WordPress, we should be hacking degrees. Anyone up for a completely informal, completely open, homemade certificate-style diploma? A handful of courses offered by all of us - take intro open ed from me, connectivism from George and Stephen, media studies from Brian (you know you’ve always wished he would teach it), and then complete three cumulative edupunk projects under the tutelage of the Reverend, D’Arcy, and Tony.
Open accreditation may be much closer than we think. We just need to continue to find creative ways to hack our courses into the existing university systems around the globe. At the same time, we need to establish a recognizable brand name for the collection of courses we would offer, so that folks will have heard of them. Until then, we’ll have to ride the strength of our names.
I think we also need to go beyond this sort of semiformal academic accreditation. Formal qualifications are trusted, third party claims about your academic achievements. They act as a standardised proxy for direct personal knowledge about an individual’s accomplishments.
But the web is potentially creating new opportunities for demonstrating that other people trust you… and their trust in you is the commodity that’s valuable when you are trying to get other people to trust you.
The idea of an ‘open achievements’ or ‘open accomplishments’ api, was intended to provide a way in to thinking about this wider sense of third party recognition and e.g. ‘assessment by the crowds’ in the case of Amazon reviewer or ebay buyer/seller trust metrics.
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.
…providing a statement of competence is only value when the provider of the statement is also trusted. I like Wiley`s concept of hacking degrees. But it is a concept that is only going to be valued by those who have familiarity with the people doing the hacking. Our little edutech world is still a bit too small…but as it grows, who nows…
This is not a new idea. I have in front of me a curriculum vitae of a person running for an important position that says: an Honors BA in an unrelated field and then Private Studies in (academic discipline) with (name of a professor) from (covers a 3 year period). Someone in authority recognized it as qualification for an entry position in a field that normally requires a Masters Degree. Whether he/she had received a Masters Degree from an accredited university or whether he/she privately studied under a professor is not going to influence the decision one way or the other as far as career progression is concerned. After proving oneself and taking on ever increasing responsibilites, it’s now all about a comparison of work experience and who has the leadership plans for the future that meet with the greatest approval.
I can think of several fields that currently require an accredited degree that still have respected members who entered the field through a combination of guided reading and working alongside and learning from someone with expertise in the area. In fact one of the fields that sometimes waives the requirement for proper accreditation is education.