AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH

Beyond the Classroom: A Path is Emerging for College Credit Earned Outside of College

Paul Fain Inside Higher Ed paul.fain@insidehighered.com

Steve Kolowich Inside Higher Ed steve.kolowich@insidehighered.com

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Prepared for the American Enterprise Institute Conference, Stretching the Higher Education Dollar August 2, 2012 The collected papers for this conference can be found at http://www.aei.org/events/2012/08/02/stretching-the-higher-education-dollar/.

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Neera Grover, a successful working professional with a well-paying job, was stuck. A business analyst for Infosys, an international consultancy based in India, Grover, 28, was looking to make some changes. She had just moved from Connecticut to the Bay Area with her husband, who worked for Microsoft. Grover was looking to reorient her career accordingly. At Infosys, her area of focus was healthcare. Now she wanted to shift her expertise to the Bay Areas main export: technology. But Grover had a problem. She did not have the chops to handle a tech account. True, she had a bachelors degree in technology and electronics from the Punjab Technical University in her native India. But that was years ago, and anyway, the modern software industry was a different animal. To make the lateral move, Grover needed more education. So she enrolled in a continuing education program, in Business Intelligence and SAS Analytics Software, at the University of California at Berkeley. Classes were held in the evenings. The program comprised five courses and 150 hours of instruction. This program is ideal if you are a post-baccalaureate business analyst wishing to gain a competitive advantage within companies with substantial information infrastructures, read a description on the Berkeley website. The price worked out to about $1,000 per course, Grover says. She struggled. The course strongly recommended that enrollees be conversant in certain math and programming concepts, and Grover was rusty. And the commute proved harder than she had hoped: the class met from 6 to 9 p.m., and Grovers work often kept her late. She enlisted her husband as a tutor, but he had his own busy schedule to keep. As the fall drew on, Grover wondered whether the whole plan was realistic. So Grover started to shift her strategy. A friend of Grovers husbanda colleague at Microsofttold her about an experiment some professors at nearby Stanford University were

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. running. The professors were taking their Stanford courses, putting them online, and inviting anyone to enroll for free. Even Grovers husband and his colleague had been using the online courses. They just wanted to take a brush-up course to recollect the things that they dont use very often, she says. Grover registered for a course called Machine Learning, taught by Andrew Ng, the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. At the very least, Grover figured the course would help her bone up on the math and programming she needed to pass her Berkeley course. And if it didnt, no matter; its not like she was paying for it. As it turned out, the course suited Grovers needs perfectly. Ng, the professor, had broken his lectures into brief, video-recorded tutorials; Grover downloaded the videos to her smartphone and watched them on the train to and from work while taking notes. She would complete the homework assignments and examinations, which were graded automatically by software that Ng and his Stanford colleagues had programmed into the courses online platform. Grover excelled, scoring a 100 percent on every assessment. She dropped out of the Berkeley program. In December, after passing the final examination in Ngs Machine Learning course, Grover got a letter from the professor. It was not a credential, exactly. It wasnt even a certificate in any usual sense. The name and seal of Stanford University appeared nowhere on the document; Stanford had firmly prohibited Ng and his colleagues from appropriating the institutional brand. What the letter did have was a signed note from Ng acknowledging that Grover had completed the Machine Learning course with flying colors. Grover says she is confident the course left her with a firm grasp of the basics of machine learning, an increasingly prevalent pillar of the software industry. But will the letter be enough to convince Grovers consulting firm, and its tech-industry clients, that she has the chops to

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. effectively analyze their business? That, she does not yet know. Grover says she wants to accumulate a few more quasi-credentials before making her case. She says she hopes a potential employer or client will judge her based on the competency with which she is able to talk about tech issues in interviewsthat is, if her cache of commendations manage to carry her that far. Im not sure how things will work out, Grover says. I will probably get to know once I start applying.

Walmart U. If the great disruption to higher education has begun, Grover and Jeana Murphy are part of its first wave. Murphy is participating in a growing movement that raises a fundamental question: should college-level credit be earned for learning that occurs outside of college? The 30-year-old assistant manager at a Walmart store in Elkin, North Carolina, is one of 2,800 Walmart employees who have enrolled at the American Public University System, an online, for-profit university that the company picked as its preferred educational provider two years ago. Like many corporations, Walmart has taken an increasingly assertive role in the education of its employees. The reason is a blend of self-interest and altruism. The company struggles with a high annual turnover among its employees, and the perk of discounted college courses is a good way to encourage workers to stick around longer. The arrangement also helps Walmart identify budding management talent, because Murphy and other junior employees have demonstrated an interest in moving up by enrolling in college.

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Its good corporate policy to encourage someone looking to take their career to a different level, says Alicia Ledlie, Walmarts senior director of associate development, even if their next job isnt with the company. Their time at Walmart is a stepping stone to a career. Another motivator, Ledlie says, is the national completion agendathe drive for more college graduates that President Obama and a number of philanthropic foundations are leading. As the worlds largest private employer, Walmarts attempt to nudge its 1.3 million workers to go to college could actually make a difference. And playing ball on college completion is good PR these days. But perhaps the most important, and controversial, aspect of the Walmart and APUS partnership is that it is a high-profile proving ground for prior learning assessment, the process of granting college credit for knowledge and experience gained outside of the traditional academic setting. APUS has worked with Walmart to determine how many credits more than 100 of its job classifications are worth, based mostly on training programs employees have completed. But onthe-job experience counts, too. The two companies convincingly describe a labor-intensive process for assessing learning in each job. However, they developed their approach to prior learning assessment largely in isolation, with limited outside review. That makes people in higher education nervous. And missteps in the partnership could hurt the broader acceptance of prior learning assessment, which many view as a squishy process, at best. Murphy was also skeptical about the deal, because she was burned once before when she tried nontraditional higher education. She attended a non-accredited, for-profit college a few years after finishing high school and liked the flexibility of the degree program, which allowed

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. her to work full-time while attending classes. But when she transferred to Wilkes Community College, none of the credits shed earned at the for-profit transferred with her. So she did some sleuthing after she heard about the APUS partnership on Walmarts employee benefit webpage. Murphy liked what she saw: employees get a 15 percent break on tuition when they work toward an associate or bachelors degree at APUS, with both sides chipping in an undisclosed portion of the discount. But she wanted to be sure that credits issued by the university would be worth her time and effort, so she checked out the Better Business Bureaus take on APUS and then called the university to ask about the transferability of credits. Tuition is cheap at APUS even before the discount. Any three-credit course from APUS is $638 for Walmart employees and $750 for the rest of the universitys 110,000 students, 64 percent of whom are active-duty members of the U.S. military. Murphy and her fellow employees can expect to shell-out $25,000 for a bachelors degree, which is far less than the national average for four-year degree programs, and roughly equal to the average amount owed by the two-thirds of bachelors degree holders who graduate with debt. The promise of prior learning credits can drive those costs down even further. Murphy heard she could expect to earn APUS credits for learning shed already completed, before she even logged onto an online course from the university. That helped sell her on enrolling. They are recognizing that these are things that Walmart is training us to do, Murphy says. This is like an answer for everything Id hoped for. Murphy qualified for twenty-one prior learning credits, after APUS and Walmart determined that her experience and training as an hourly assistant manager covered the learning requirements in seven APUS courses, such as retail operations and principles of supervision. The 21-credit head start on her way to a bachelors degree in retail management saved Murphy

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. $4,466 in tuition. And she didnt have to take a test to prove that knowledge, because her on-thejob training itself had been assessed. APUS fits the bill for most Walmart employees, according to a survey the company conducted prior to inking the deal. Fully one-third of workers say they have considered enrolling in college during their time at Walmart, but so far had decided not to apply. The main obstacle is scheduling, rather than money, according to nearly three-quarters of employees. So it wasnt surprising that 72 percent of Walmart employees say they would prefer getting a college degree from a fully-accredited online university, according to the survey, compared to only 28 percent who say they would prefer attending their local community college. Among this demographic, convenience counts. Like most of her colleagues, Murphys schedule came first as she considered pursuing her bachelors degree. As an hourly employee, she needed flexibility and was attracted to the self-pacing of online courses from APUS, which allows her to squeeze in work on assignments when she can. You have all week to complete your work, she says. I feel that the school and Walmart are working for me.

Widening the Gate Americans are unhappy about the price of college. Rising tuition and student debt levels have been labeled national crises, and not just by politicians and cable TV pundits. Yet more students than ever are enrolling, and a meaningful college credentiala degree or certificateremains the coin of the realm. Only in information technology, where the stereotypical college dropout CEO is a powerful (and misleading) image, can job-seekers list

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. alternative credentials and realistically have some chance of seeing their resume come up a winner. And even in IT, established higher-education players call the shots. Take the Cisco Certified Network Associate credential, which the computing giant oversees to give credence to networking skills. Courses for the certification are administered by Pearson VUE, a subsidiary of Pearson Education, which has perhaps the deepest reach of any higher-education entity. And the University of Phoenix this year announced a partnership with Cisco for offering the certification as an associate degree. Theres a simple reason for the increase in tuition levels in higher education: the cost of delivering an education in the traditional setting is increasing just as fast as tuition. There are obvious cost-drivers, like compensation for the thousands of faculty and staff that run a large, brick-and-mortar campus, and all the money that goes into those facilities. And for public institutions, slashed state budgets are the biggest reason for tuition hikes. Other costs are less obvious, like rapidly-increasing insurance premiums or even the arms-race mentality of institutional financial aid, where some colleges try to outbid each other to get students in the door, driving the sticker price up and net tuition revenue down. Technology is also a loss-leader in higher education. Despite all its promise, digital innovation has become just another add-on to keep campuses thrumming with all the bells-andwhistles needed to keep students and staff happy. As one college president says, he has millions of dollars of Ethernet cable rigged throughout his campus. Installed a decade ago, its all worthless. But many in higher education feel the Internet may soon begin to deliver as a cost-saver, where a high-quality course can be taught to far more students than can be crammed in any

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. lecture hall. This form of course-deliver extension can add efficiency for colleges, and also undermine their traditional business model. Colleges dont like to leave money on the table. They charge what they can for degrees, without having to prove the value of their product. But that powerful grip on the price of credentialing may be loosening, at least a little bit, with the rise of competency-based higher education, prior-learning assessment, and Massively Open Online Courses.

MOOCroeconomics Neera Grovers storyand machine learning, the subject she chose when reorienting her consulting career to the software industryhold a particular relevance to the way technology could change the economics of higher education. The Stanford course Grover took for free online is a new species of education module known as a Massively Open Online Course, or a MOOC. This large-scale model for course delivery emerged in the late summer of 2011, when a cadre of Stanford professors decided to see if they could create an interactive educational experience for hundreds of thousands of learners at a time using advanced software that administers and assesses assignments and exams automatically. They called their organization Udacity. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology soon followed. Several months later, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley pledged to adapt certain courses as MOOCs through Coursera, a company Ng, the Stanford professor who taught Grovers Machine Learning course, had started with his colleague, Daphne Koller, a fellow computer science professor. Harvard quickly joined forces with MIT on its platform, edX.

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Online education had been booming for years, first among for-profit institutions and then large public universities and community colleges, while the elite institutions mostly stood by. Now they were scrambling not to be left behind, having decided, quite abruptly, that the medium had something to teach the standard-bearers of higher learning. Online education is not an enemy of residential education, said Susan Hockfield, then the president of MIT at the edX unveiling, but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally. So what makes MOOCs exceptional? In a word, scalability. While most online courses attempt to maintain a somewhat comparable faculty-to-student ratio as face-to-face courses, the MOOC platforms are designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of students while keeping the number of faculty (one or two professors and maybe a few teaching assistants) the same. A typical online course at a traditional university might enroll between several dozen and several hundred studentsthe same as many traditional courses. MOOCs shift the ratio by orders of magnitude: last fall, two Stanford professors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, taught an introductory course in Artificial Intelligence to 160,000 people; 23,000 of them completed the course, passing the same midterm and final exams as the 200 Stanford students who took the face-to-face version in Palo Alto. MOOCs endeavor to accommodate hundreds of thousands of students without hiring a proportional number of instructors by automating certain duties that historically have fallen to human professors and their assistants both in face-to-face and typical online courses: that is, assessing student work and answering their questions. Coursera, Udacity, and edX have each developed software that can promptly grade student assignments, hundreds of thousands at a time.

Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. These systems often go well beyond tallying up multiple-choice answers. Many of the MOOCs that have already been through successful beta runs involve project-oriented assignments. For example, Udacity, a company started by Thrun and Norvig, offers a Computer Science 101 course that is oriented to teaching students how to build a search engine. Another teaches students how to program a robotic vehicle. Students in these courses are assigned to write programming code, and then the viability of their code is tested automatically. (Sample exam question: ...[B]uild a planner that helps a robot find the shortest way in a warehouse filled with boxes that he has to pick up and deliver to a drop zone.) Not to be outdone, MIT professors have built a virtual circuitry laboratory for edXs inaugural MOOC, Circuits & Electronics. Anant Agarwal, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT and the president of edX, says he and his colleagues have built online labs where students can play with simulated receptors, multimeters, and other equipment by clicking around their screens. Because the software is running on MIT servers, even students without powerful computers can run the virtual lab as long as they have a good Internet connection. Granted, the students in the MOOC version of Circuits & Electronics might not be getting practice handling physical components, picking up sensory cues (Say, does anyone smell burning?), and avoiding electrocution. But the architects of these virtual labs can write glitches and obstacles into the platform to simulate what electrical engineers might experience when dealing with actual circuit boards, says Agarwal. At the end of the day, a simulation may not completely replicate a real live lab experience, he says. But it can come pretty close. The virtual labs are expensive to develop, but over time and at scale Agarwal expects them to cost less than physical labs. The university spends money on the physical space and

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. equipment in direct proportion to the number of students it serves; with virtual labs, the cost of the simulation software would theoretically go down as more students register. (The first iteration of the course drew 120,000 registrants at the outset, and its overseers reported no capacity problems.) The MOOC developers seem confident that they can assess students programming and engineering skills using robots. But the extent to which these platforms stand to shift the economics of higher education may depend in part on how broadly they can be applied across a curriculum. Math, engineering, and computer science involve problem-solving processes that are particularly amenable to automated grading. But as MOOCs expand into the humanities and social sciences, the question remains as to whether assessment in these disciplines, which tends to be more qualitative, can be carried out effectively at scale. Robotic essay-reading software has grown in sophistication in recent years, but can still be fooled or confused by unconventional prose. On MITs own campus, Les Perelman, the director of the writing center, has carried the flag for the anti-automatons, conducting a number of studies that have demonstrated, among other things, that popular essay-scoring software from the Educational Testing Service would have flunked Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg Address. And while software developed for standardized writing tests does a good job of judging the coherence of a (short) piece of writing, nonhuman readers still have a hard time assessing the veracity of claims the writer is making. To address this, Ng and Koller, the Coursera co-founders, say they plan to turn the scale problem against itself with a method called calibrated peer review. Similar to Web 2.0 projects that use their users both to generate and moderate content, the instructors of essay-intensive MOOCs may deputize its more capable students as teaching assistants. The instructors could

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. give these students a grading rubric and, using incentives, could ask them to grade a number of short-answer essays. Each essay would be scored by multiple readers, then the scores would be averaged to produce the essay grade. Koller says she believes such a system would score student work at least as well as a pretty good teaching assistant. The viability of this approach would depend on the instructors ability to enlist a critical mass of volunteer readers; and it remains to be proved whether MOOC instructors could incentivize such a system successfully. That said, calibrated peer review at least posits a plausible model for using technology to assess non-quantitative student coursework at scale without relying on automatons. So what exactly do MOOCs have to do with stretching the higher education dollar? The answer depends on whose dollar you are talking about. As far as student dollars, MOOCs provide obvious savings in that they enable students to take entire courses, while getting the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the material on assessments that are at least somewhat credible, without paying a dime. All of the MOOC providers say they plan to give students the opportunity to earn some sort of credential by paying a small fee. At Coursera, deserving students might pay between $30 and $80 for a signed letter from their instructor certifying that they have passed the same exams as students getting Ivy League credit. (Compare that to the $1,000 Neera Grover was paying to take a similar course at Berkeley extension school.) Udacity, meanwhile, recently signed a deal with Pearson Education that would let it hold proctored exams at Pearsons ubiquitous testing centers, a move that could give those certifications more credibility. If MOOC credentials become accepted currency among employers, then students with certain educational goals, such as acquiring the skills to transition from healthcare to the tech industry, might be able to do so without dipping too deep

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. into their bank accounts. However, that is still a very big if. The alternative credential movement has some buzz, but the current infrastructure for sorting resumes and assessing job skills remains oriented to traditional indicatorsin particular, documents that bear the seal of a traditional university. At the end of the day you've got to have something that employers really believe in, said Bill Gates in a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. And today what they believe in by and large are degrees. As far as stretching institutional dollars, the promise of MOOCs lies in the scalability of quality education. The tricky part seems to be assessing the quality of MOOCs. So far the most popular ones are taught by well-respected professors at reputable universities, who promise that the rigor of the massively open online versions will be equivalent to those being held in classrooms in Princeton, Cambridge, Palo Alto, and Ann Arbor. But there is an important distinction to be drawn between the rigor of the assessment and the rigor of the instruction. The purported achievement of MOOCs is their ability to evaluate complex student work hundreds of thousands of assignments at a time. But the rigor of instruction has to do with the vigilance with which the instructors, human or otherwise, usher students from ignorance to mastery. MOOCs can measure what students know. But can they measure what students learn? And can they measure the extent to which that learning is attributable to the quality of instruction and support available in the Coursera, Udacity, and edX platforms? Currently, MOOCs operate on Darwinian principles. When Norvig and Thrun held their first artificial intelligence MOOC, only 10 percent of the 160,000 people who registered for the course wound up completing it. Udacitys subsequent courses in introductory computer science and robotic car programming have yielded similar retention rates, according to David Stavens, the companys chief operating officer. The success rates at Coursera have been similar: more

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. than 100,000 people registered for Andrew Ngs course in machine learning last fall; 13,000 completed it with a passing grade. Neera Grover was the exception, not the rule. A student whose academic qualifications would normally have them looking at degree programs at an institution with moderate or non-competitive admissions standards would probably not be able to survive the rigors of edX, says Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. So it stands to reason that a provost at such an institution would not want to throw the majority of her students to the wolves by eliminating certain existing courses and directing students to MOOCs instead. To the extent that other universities might adopt a MOOC into their curriculums, they would likely do so in a way that would apply additional layers of instructional rigor. These layers would likely consist of instructor-led discussions, tutoring support, and other resources that might boost student success but would add to the cost delivering a MOOC solely through software and pre-recorded tutorials. Where technology might stand a better chance of stretching the higher education dollar is through a less massive kind of interactive online course, where automatons are enlisted not primarily to assess whether students have learned course material on their own but to hold their hand through the entire learning process.

Rise of the Teaching Machines If Neera Grovers decision to abandon a traditional avenue of continuing higher education and take a MOOC was portentous, so was her choice of what MOOC to take. Machine learning is not only ascendant in the tech industry, it is also increasingly relevant to conversations about the cost of delivery in higher education.

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. As defined by Ng, who teaches a free, online version of his old Stanford machine learning course through Coursera, machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In other words, it is the science of teaching a computer, or a software program, to learn things about their environmentor a person with whom it is interacting; her habits, her flawsand then adapt without being given a specific directive by some human overseer. Machine learning is the principle at the foundation of what researchers at the nonprofit Ithaka S+R have referred to as highly interactive, adaptive, online learning systems. In recent studies, the Ithaka researchers have taken to calling them ILO systems, short for Interactive Learning Online. These ILO systems theoretically stand to increase the number of students each faculty member can effectively usher through a course, while still giving each student a modicum of personal attention. In other words, while current examples of ILO fall short of human tutelage in some ways, they may exceed it in others. At Carnegie Mellon University, Candace Thille has been developing ILO systems for years through Carnegie Mellons Online Learning Initiative, which she directs. The idea is to build courses that walk students through concepts and then drill them; all the while intuiting how well they understand the material, recognizing where they are getting tripped up, and nudging them accordingly. Ideally, it is like giving each student a private tutorwho, though unable to talk through problems orally, is incredibly observant and skilled at collecting data. This, as it turns out, is an economical way to get people to learn. In a study of students taking an ILO statistics course that excised human instruction, conducted in fall 2005 and spring 2006, Thille and her colleagues found that removing living, breathing instructors from the course did not harm student performance; the handholding provided by the artificially intelligent

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Carnegie Mellon software was enough to perform as well as their human-led counterparts on three midterms and a final exam. During the spring 2006 trial the researchers also had the software-only students take CAOS, a standardized test for statistical competence among students who have only taken one course in the subject. Here again, the students did not appear to suffer as a result of learning solely from non-human tutors. In another study, conducted in spring 2007, Thille and her colleagues studied what would happen if ILO systems were used in concert with human instructors. In that trial, the machineguided students also performed as well or better than the control group, with one major difference: they learned the material in half the time. In a follow-up 2010 study, Marsha Lovett, associate director of Carnegie Mellons Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, found that students taking the blended statistics course (i.e. ILO systems taking the place of most classroom time) were able to master in eight weeks what their peers in the traditional version took fifteen weeks to learn. Even more recently, researchers at Ithaka S+R recently tested the no harm hypothesis with a larger and more diverse sample: 605 students, representing a broad range of academic and demographic backgrounds, at six public universities. The researchers, led by former Princeton University president William C. Bowen, found that Carnegie Mellons machine-guided statistics courses did not negatively affect student learning outcomes when used in place of most, though not all, human instruction (students went to class with a human professor for one hour per week instead of three). If these studies do in fact indicate a larger truth about the effectiveness and efficiency of machine-guided learning systems, it means that universities could theoretically enroll more students without hiring more faculty or building new classrooms. That would reduce the cost of

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. educating each student without shortchanging them on learning outcomes. Universities could also try to keep enrollment figures steady while reducing faculty, but, thought Bowen, that could be a tougher road to hoe. As far as figuring how much institutions could save, Bowen and his colleagues are careful not to estimate recklessly. The researchers did undertake some cost probes wherein they attempted to simulate how much less it would cost certain universities involved with the study if the universities replaced two different traditional models of course delivery with a blended version that relies heavily on machine-guided instruction. They came up with some estimates, but decided not to publish those studies in full because they were too speculative and subject to variation. So the data so far suggest that deploying ILO systems at traditional universities would indeed stretch the higher education dollar with respect to how much it costs to deliver a course with a modicum of hand-holding. Exactly how far these systems can stretch that dollar is still an open question.

Learning What You Already Know Students get to graduation quicker if they can earn credits for previous experience and training. And by taking fewer courses they spend less on a degree. But prior learning assessments potential impact is bigger than just a handful of credits for adult students. The processs broader acceptance, which is still a work-in-progress, would mean that students, employers, and the academy itself all acknowledge that learning outside the academic setting is worthy of college credit. And prior learning assessment hinges on determining what someone has learned, with less value placed on how or where they learned it.

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. That philosophical shift would help open the door further for competency-based learning models, like Western Governors University (WGU), the example du jour for education reformers, and other nontraditional approaches, where students can prove what they know in self-paced, online environments. As a result, some higher education insiders think prior learning could be as disruptive as the Internet to higher educations current model. Prior learning is the next phase, says Ed Klonoski, president of Charter Oak State College, an online, public institution in Connecticut with a deep prior-learning repertoire. Its the next disruption. There are four general methods of assessing learning outside the classroom: the review of student-generated portfolios, credit recommendations based on corporate or military training programs, reviews by individual colleges, and exams used to verify learning achievement. Done well, prior learning uses sophisticated testing, like the College Level Examination Program (CLEP), Excelsior College Exams, and the DANTES Subject Standardized Tests, to measure college-level learning rather than life experience. The process is hardly new, with roots in the post-WWII return of G.I.s, many of whom earned credits for their military training. This might be its moment to break into the mainstream, however, thanks to the completion agenda and the recessions wake, which has driven a growing number of working adults back to college for second or third careers. No one ever took an interest in this until this whole completion agenda took hold, says Pamela Tate, president and CEO of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). One in five Americans of working age has some college credits but no degree, according to the Lumina Foundation. And those 40 million or so adults are the best place to start on the

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. completion agenda. More than half of adult students with prior learning credits earned a college degree within seven years, according to a study conducted by CAEL, compared to only one in five who didnt. And those much higher completion rates held when the study controlled for risk factors, like whether a student received financial aid. But dont expect to hear much about prior learning. The news media isnt particularly interested in adult students who attend non-status colleges, fixating instead on four-year, residential collegesa much smaller, but wealthier piece of the higher-ed pie. Furthermore, colleges themselves arent keen on advertising that corporate and military training, or other forms experiential learning, can count for credits in the same way as facultytaught courses. Therein lies prior learnings biggest remaining barrier: faculty members and traditional colleges who havent bought into the process. Without colleges honoring prior learning credits, they dont count toward degrees. More than half of colleges accept some form of prior learning credit, but often in small doses, such as for extension programs. And the going is slow to get more colleges to sign on, given wariness about prior learning and the persistent notion that it is merely exchanging cash for credits. There are some PLA programs out there that look like credit laundering, says Melanie Booth, an expert on prior learning and the dean of learning and assessment at Marylhurst University. Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American Council on Education (ACE), says prior learning does have seedy examples in its past, but argues that the practice has matured. She compares reluctance about prior learning to major universities long refusal to accept transfer students from community colleges. That stance has largely faded, and so will skepticism about prior learning, she predicts.

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Many professors, however, will be a tough sell. Johann Neem, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University, has written critically about prior learning assessment, giving voice to a widely-held view that it is a shallow measure. Neem doubts any testing-based assessment can adequately gauge the most important aspects of learning, like sophisticated thinking, original ideas, and creativity. Can they evaluate the kind of experiences and work that go into a senior thesis, a lab experiment, or an artistic performance? he asks. Can they assess whether or not students are inspired? Or do they, in practice, end up rewarding much simpler things? Assessments are not even the biggest problem, Neem and other faculty critics argue, who point to conflating the certification role of college with more important educational goals. While tests and grading are clearly important, the primary purpose of college is to educate, Neem says, and assessment is only one part of the learning process that happens in college. Now that we are told that everyone must go to college, there is a lot of pressure to find ways to make college fast and cheap, he says. And thats why we are under pressure to award credit for prior learning. Also at play is the real threat prior learning assessment poses to faculty members, both in their control of teaching students and, potentially, their job security. When a college recognizes that a students prior learning covers a particular course requirement, thats one more class the student wont have to takeand an empty seat in that professors class. Prior learning assessments and accompanying credit recommendations have become a valid substitute for course work at a college, says David Moldoff, an expert on prior learning who is the founder and CEO of AcademyOne, a company that works on academic credit transfer and degree portability. And that is a bitter pill for for some faculty members. Its very hard for

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. academics to say were going to outsource this, he says.

Credit Where Its Due? Two of prior learning assessments early adopters will have a big say in whether the process truly takes off. CAEL and ACE, both nonprofits, already play large roles in determining what counts for college credit. But they could soon occupy more powerful niches, wielding accreditorlike status as national arbiters on credit for prior and experiential learning. CAEL was founded in 1974, as an offshoot of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE and other tests. The council is independent now, and is considered the standard setter on helping adult students earn college credit for what you already know, to quote from one of its taglines. CAEL has been busy of late, having launched a prior learning portfolio review service for individual students last year, and after expanding its consulting work with colleges. Tate says the group has seen a big spike in prior learning interest over the last year, from students, colleges, and corporations. Every single day we get calls from companies. Through its relatively-new online portfolio service, Learning Counts, students pay $500 to take a three-credit (credit recommendation, that is) course on experiential learning theory, which also gives practical tips for how to prepare a portfolio. The fee for a one-to-twelve credit review by a CAEL-approved faculty assessor in a particular discipline is $250. Perhaps most importantly, at least from students perspectives, the credit recommendations from CAEL get the imprimatur of ACE, giving them clout at many colleges. And CAEL has signed up scores of participating colleges as part of Learning Counts, which, interestingly, was started with seed money from the Lumina Foundation, a heavy-hitter on college completion. Those institutions have agreed to send their students through the process and

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. then accept the resulting credit recommendations from CAEL assessors. The list of participating colleges includes mostly open-access institutions, with plenty of for-profits and community colleges, like Argosy University, Herzing University, Ivy Tech Community College, and several community colleges in Massachusetts, to name a few. But four-year colleges have also signedon, including the University of Memphis, and, on the highly-selective end, George Washington University. Colleges also conduct portfolio reviews themselves, and a few for-profit services have sprung up of late, most notably KNEXT, a subsidiary of Kaplan Higher Education. CAEL has a big start, however, and individual colleges seem to be the only current threat to Learning Counts. For-profits do plenty of prior learning assessment. The University of Phoenix leads the way with perhaps the most robust process. And nonprofit colleges, including community colleges and colleges with heavy online focuses, are also in the game. The big draw for many is that prior learning can give their enrollment a boost by enticing adult students. Like CAEL, Charter Oak, which is a public, online college, offers portfolio reviews to students who complete a three-credit course in portfolio development. The college also reviews training programs for employees of government agencies, nonprofits, and companies, and makes credit recommendations for students who have gone through those programs. For example, faculty members reviewed training by the Connecticut State Police Academy. And now police officers who have successfully completed the departments six-month program qualify to receive thirty-two credits from Charter Oak, in courses like criminal investigation and interpersonal communication. That means police officers will be more than halfway to a 60-credit associate degree as soon as they enroll.

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. The college follows guidelines developed by CAEL, and accepts credit recommendations from ACE. But Klonoski says Charter Oak is able to handle the rest of its prior learning load by itself. The problem for CAEL and ACE is that theyre not accredited institutions, he says. We also do the same thing they do, but were a little cheaper. And, he adds: We can transcript those credits.

ACE in the Hole Prior learning is the Wild West of higher education in many ways. Adult students must do plenty of research to figure out the steps of getting credit for their work experience. And standards vary at the growing number of colleges that have begun accepting those credits. The challenge is they all do it differently, Moldoff says. The industry still is going to be very fragmented, at least for a while. Trust in the process also remains fleeting for students, colleges, and employers. As a result, respected national authorities, particularly nonprofits, have an opportunity to step into that void and set rules people respect. Thats where CAEL and ACE have an advantage over other priorlearning players. Both groups have more work to do to fully assume those roles, however, particularly ACE. As the primary umbrella group for higher education, ACEs membership includes leaders of 1,600 colleges and universities as well as 200 other associations. Taken together, the association represents 80 percent of higher educations total enrollment. Getting such a large group to move in the same direction is tough, particularly on something controversial, and even threatening. And some observers think ACE will fail to get its most powerful members to back

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. prior learning, or will take too long to capitalize on the opening created by the completion agenda. The association, however, has the most national clout on what learning should count for credit. Beginning with its work with the military, ACE has done credit evaluations for training programs offered by 600 corporations, professional associations, labor unions, and government agencies, ranging from Starbucks and Jiffy Lube to the Federal Aviation Administration Academy and the National Security Agency. Each evaluation costs around $25,000 for a few course equivalents, with added fees for more credits, and is typically renewed every three years for the base fee. The programs then get ACE credit recommendations can be used at a growing number of colleges. One of the most established ACE corporate training reviews is of McDonalds Hamburger University, an arrangement that goes back forty years. Hamburger U. trains 5,000 employees a year, some of whom walk away with substantial credit recommendations. For example, restaurant manager training yields an average of twenty-three credits, including three credits in business management and one credit in delivery skills for presentation. McDonalds has recruited partner institutions to grant those credits, including the University of Phoenix and online branches of Penn State and Drexel Universities. But most traditional colleges still exercise judgment in deciding which credits to accept from Hamburger U., and many do not accept all of ACEs recommendations. The association has brought in a big name to try to enlist more colleges on its credit push. Gretchen M. Bataille, the former president of the University of North Texas and senior vice president of the University of North Carolina System, oversees the associations prior learning

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. work as the head of its Center for Lifelong Learning. It will be her job to move the needle, and the next year will be crucial, experts say. ACE is really at the center of this, says John Ebersole, president of Excelsior College. In the meantime, some corporations may try to fly solo on prior learning programs, and follow Walmarts lead in developing an exclusive deal with a partner college with limited outside review. APUS officials say they hired a college president steeped in prior learning to kick the tires on the partnership. And while the two companies say they leaned heavily on guidelines from ACE and CAEL, they have not formally worked with either group. I did not give them a blessing, Tate says. They didnt go through us. Tate says some institutions prior learning reviews are not up to snuff, particularly at certain community colleges, which she declines to identify. To help bring up standards, and to expand its reach, CAEL this summer began offering fee-based site reviews for colleges on prior learning. Those that make the grade get a seal of approval, Tate says. As for ACE, Bataille is confident that the association will grab its prior-learning moment. Who better than ACE to map out an adult learning agenda, she says. We as the whole higher education enterprise need to be discriminating. But we need to be open-minded about there being other ways to teach.

Policy Hurdles Prior learning appears to have growing support from lawmakers. In perhaps the biggest sign that the process has gained policy traction, the Obama administration earlier this year announced that community colleges would need to use prior learning assessment to be eligible for $2 billion in grants from the Department of Labor. As a result, the process may have a leg up on competency-

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. based models, which get plenty of lip service but not much actual help, at least from federal regulators. Ebersole has worked on competency-based education and prior learning assessment for thirty years. He believes the time for both has finally arrived, but that the Department of Education has stymied progress. He says its not that the feds dont want to help adult students, like Excelsiors average student, who is 39-years-old and enrolls at the private institution with transcripts from five different colleges. But the regulatory framework, much of which has been bulked-up to crack down on for-profit colleges, makes innovation hard to bring to market, he says, and expensive. Theyre trying to demonstrate to the American public that theyre stewarding Title IV dollars, Ebersole says, referring to federal financial aid. But I do not believe theyve done their homework. Ebersole cites a new federal rule, adopted in 2011, which requires colleges to get authorization from every state in which they educate students in order to be eligible to accept federal aid. For Excelsior and other online colleges, that means complicated approval processes in states where they enroll students over the Internet. To operate in Florida, for example, Excelsior had to give state regulators a CV for all of their nearly 1,000 adjunct faculty members. And those CVs had to be notarized, Ebersole says, which isnt easy for professors who live overseas. States have taken their marching orders from the feds, observers say, but also are motivated by protectionismmeaning the desire to keep outside colleges from entering the stateand by revenue from registration fees.

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Another policy hurdle is the federal governments approach to competency-based education. Western Governors, like Excelsior, is a nonprofit that caters to adult students and features relatively cheap tuition. But the universitys much-heralded contribution is that it measures students academic progress through their successful completion of a series of assessments, rather than through credit hours or how much time they spend in class. The university offers no classes or lectures in its bachelors and masters degree programs, and does not operate on a fixed academic calendar. Students get credit when they can prove competency by passing examinations. And for what they cant pass, they are given learning materials and some light guidance. The university charges tuition every six months, ranging from $2,890 to $4,250, depending on the program. And students can take exams whenever they feel they are ready. Education reformers like the idea of breaking the link between seat-time and credit, which is what competency-based education offers. I want them to be the norm, Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, has said of competency-based models. And WGUs relativelypure competency focus, coupled with the ability for its students to receive federal financial aid, is what sets the institution apart. For example, its eligibility to participate in federal Title IV aid programs is a key difference between the university and StraighterLine, for example, which is another emerging, low-cost model for online education. Spun off as an independent, nonprofit college in 2010, StraighterLine offers about forty online courses for $99 per month or $399 for six months. Students receive ACE credit recommendations when they complete StraighterLine courses. The coursework is self-paced, and takes about forty days on average to finish. But StraighterLine students have passed courses in a single week, meaning $99 can lead to three credits. Even more

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. tantalizing, StraighterLine in May announced that free, open courses offered by the Saylor Foundation could be used for ACE credit through StraighterLine, which starts to sound a bit like MOOCs for credit. Unlike WGU, however, StraighterLine is not a Title IV institution. But even WGUs federal aid status is a bit misleading, and not as unique as many in higher education believe. A 2005 law, created specifically for the university, fashioned a path for colleges to participate in federal aid programs by directly assessing how much students are learning, without requiring course hours or time in the classroom. But WGU never pursued that authority. And no other college has successfully received competency-based financial aid status. So a model that truly disconnects learning from the classroomtaking prior learning and competency to the next levelwhile also serving students who benefit from financial aid, has yet to get off the ground. Excelsior has tried, and failed. The college has a competency-based associate degree program in nursing, which the Stanford Research Institute has praised for its academic quality. To be admitted to the program, applicants must hail from a medical background, so Excelsior can skip the clinical skills courses that remain difficult to teach online. Ebersole says the college had asked the Education Department to classify a new, online nursing degree program as competency-based, as we understood they were willing to do for WGU. But Excelsior was denied. This has forced us to spend over a million dollars to create an online option that will not be aid-eligible, he says, which will cost students at least five times more than the assessment-based approach. Competency-based learning, particularly when coupled with prior learning credits, can substantially reduce the cost of a college degree. But for now, the higher education establishment and federal regulators are not quite sold on, as Ebersole says, accepting ways of learning other

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. than in the classroom.

A Patchwork Path The three emerging forms of college-level learning outside of collegeMOOCs, prior learning assessment, and competency-based educationcould all be used together. And that convergence is likely to happen soon. Assuming that a formal college credential will remain the primary sorting mechanism for employers for the next twenty years or so, a safe assumption, most agree, means that any unbundled learning must lead to college credit. So for now, the budding idea of badges or other credentials that are not linked to a meaningful, industry-recognized certificate or collegeissued degree, remain merely intriguing. Lets start with a hypothetical, based on a real-life example. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in May reported that a surprisingly large number of students at local community and technical colleges already hold bachelors degrees, sometimes from the states prestigious flagship, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The job market remains tough in Wisconsin, and some college graduates are enrolling at two-year institutions to pursue associate degrees with hard skills. For example, 5.5 percent of recent graduates at Madison Area Technical College already held a bachelors degree, according to the newspaper. So lets say Student A graduated from the flagship at Madison in 2011 with a degree in English. He wanted to work in journalism (a tough field) and got a job working at a start-up website, which attempted to do local reporting and lifestyle-oriented writing about Milwaukees hipster set. The office was small, with only a few employees, and Student As bosses quickly realized he had a talent for website designall self-taught. So he spent a good chunk of his time

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. helping the companys one full-time IT employee. Then, two years after being hired, the website folded, and Student A went to live with his parents. While on the couch at home, Student A heard about Coursera, and decided to indulge his growing curiosity about computer programming. He took four Coursera MOOCs: Algorithms, Part I, taught by two Princeton professors; Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I, a Stanford professors course; Software Engineering for SaaS, from a Berkeley professor; and Internet History, Technology and Security, taught by a Michigan professor. He completed all the courses with flying colors (but no grades), receiving certificates for them. CAELs Tate says successfully-completed MOOCs can and will garner credit recommendations through portfolio-based prior learning assessment. That will no doubt be put to the test soon, as over a million people registered for Coursera classes in the month or so after the venture announced its expanded offerings. Student A is one of the first to try, at least according to this fiction. He signs up for Learning Counts and takes the three-credit portfolio course. At the same time, he enrolls at Madison Area Technical College, and decides to begin working toward an associate degree in applied science, in the IT-programmer/analyst track, which is designed to land entry-level IT jobs in manufacturing, government and insurance, to name a few. The technical college is a Learning Counts partner, and has therefore agreed to accept the programs credit recommendations. He takes the course from CAEL, spending about $750 on it. The faculty advisor recommends nine credits for the Coursera courses he completed, and the college approves those credits. Student A is on his way, but hasnt saved too much money. At $116.90 per credit, those courses would have cost $1,052 if he had just taken them at the technical college. But the

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. Coursera classes, which ran over five to six weeks, were quicker and more convenient than the standard face-to-face courses he would have taken. Even better, Student A was able to give Coursera a whirl risk-free, and the courses helped him decide to dive into the associate degree program. Another fictional story gives a glimpse of how to add the third leg of the stool: competency. Student B has no college degree. She has worked for twelve years as an administrative assistant at a food-delivery service in Utica, New York, but dreams of starting her own catering company. She heard about Excelsior College, where she could probably get some credit for her work experience, thanks to Excelsiors competency-based examinations and its partner status with Learning Counts. Student B is ambitious and an intrepid researcher, obviously so, given that she found Excelsior, which doesnt have the highest national profile. She also read about the Khan Academy, and had taken several mathematics tutorials on the websiteincluding ones on statistics and college-level algebra. She wants to earn an associates degree in applied science in admin/management studies from Excelsior, or maybe a bachelors, eventually. Excelsior offers credit by examination in several courses that could apply to that associate degree. So Student B takes two course exams, using knowledge she earned on the job. She passes one, in the threecredit interpersonal communications, which she learned well dealing with her companys drivers and often-persnickety customers. She also trims her time-to-degree by receiving fifteen credits for her Learning Counts portfolio. As Student B quickly progresses through the associate program, she often uses Khan Academy videos as tutoring guides. Its a habit she takes with her, after graduating in two years. She had to keep working at her job to pay the bills, but the online format is flexible enough that

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Draft: Please do not cite without permission from the author. she can work around those hours. She also graduates with little debt, and decides to enroll at Western Governors University, to pursue an online bachelors in business management, where competency can get her to graduation within eighteen more months of study. Along the way, she continues to take MOOCs from a growing number of top-flight universities, which by now charge small fees for each classmaybe $30. For now, both of these students have no proxy in reality. To follow their paths to degrees would require a breadth of knowledge about how to navigate the system that few possess, even these two higher-education reporters, who have included a healthy dollop of conjecture in the two scenarios. But in this game of connect-the-dots, more solid lines will emerge. The reason, put simply, is that millions of adult students need to earn degrees in their limited spare time. And a growing number of colleges and companiesboth traditional institutions and outsiderswant to meet that demand. So the day may soon arrive where students can take free, non-credit classes from Michigan and Stanford professors, and pay less than a thousand bucks to earn credits for those classes and their prior-learning from colleges like Excelsior or WGU, with ACE and CAEL refereeing the process. Traditional colleges will continue to thrive in the near future, and beyond. But in the emerging post-traditional era of American higher education, students will have more control in cobbling together their pathway to graduation. And at the end of that path will be credentials that say more about what students know than where they learned it.

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