Online competency-based education

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines:

“Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure. When Christensen fails in his predictions it’s usually because he doesn’t pay attention to things that don’t fit neatly into his preferred narratives. For example, he and co-author Michael Horn previously hyped for-profit education companies and failed to see that for many of them actually educating students was not the point. Rather those companies identified a “head I win, tails you lose” business proposition in “chasing Title IV money [i.e., government-subsidized student loans] in a federal financial aid system ripe for gaming.” This represents a second try by Christensen and his associates to forecast the future of post-secondary education.

“The MOOC Misstep and the Open Education Infrastructure” (David Wiley). One of Clayton Christensen’s blind spots is that he tends to overlook what’s going on in the area of not for profit endeavors. In his blog “Iterating toward Openness” David Wiley covers the general area of open educational resources (or OER); this post is a good introduction to his thinking.

Web Literacy Map (Mozilla project). A real-world example of the sort of competency-based open education initiative that Wiley’s promoting. See also the Open Badges project, a Mozilla-sponsored initiative to create an open infrastructure for granting and publishing credentials.

A Smart Way to Skip College in Pursuit of a Job (Eduardo Porter for the New York Times). “Nanodegrees” are online education provider Udacity’s own take on competency-based education, created in cooperation with major employers.

“Missing Links: How Coding Bootcamps Are Doing What Higher Ed and Recruiting Can’t” (Robert McGuire for SkilledUp). You may be beginning to see a trend here: A lot of the action in competency-based training is around software development, data science, and related fields. That’s because there’s high demand for skilled employees in certain fields and a lack of truly-focused traditional educational offerings to meet that demand. A related trend: Sites like SkilledUp that are trying to be become trusted guides to these new-style offerings.

Last but not least, here are some other people’s reviews of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization courses on Coursera that I’m currently taking:

• “Online Course Reviews: The Data Scientist’s Toolbox, and Getting and Cleaning Data, from Coursera’s Data Science Specialization”
• “Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses”
• “Johns Hopkins’s Online Data Science Certification [sic] Via Coursera”
• “Is it worth it to pay 9 * $49 for a data science specialization on Coursera?”
• “Reviews of: Coursera Data Science Specialization Track”

From a local point of view these changes (if indeed they continue and are amplified) are not likely to affect high-end universities like Johns Hopkins; they’ll survive based on their ability to select the most talented applicants and plug them into a set of networks that will maximize their chances of success.¹ The question is rather how they’ll affect institutions like Howard Community College that serve a broader student population that’s looking to acquire job-relevant skills.