Unbundled: Designing Personalized Pathways for Every Learner — from gettingsmart.com by Nate McClennen “with contributions from the Getting Smart team and numerous friends and partners in the field”
Excerpts:
In this publication, we articulate the critical steps needed to unbundle the learning ecosystem, build core competencies, design learning experiences, curate new opportunities, and rebundle these experiences into coherent pathways.
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Vision
Every learner deserves an unlimited number of unbundled opportunities to explore, engage, and define experiences that advance their progress along a co-designed educational pathway. Each pathway provides equitable and personalized access to stacked learning experiences leading to post-secondary credentials and secure family-sustaining employment. Throughout the journey, supportive coaches focus on helping learners build skills to navigate with agency. In parallel, learners develop foundational skills (literacy, math), technical skills, and durable skills and connect these to challenging co-designed experiences. The breadth and depth of experiences increase over time, and, in partnership, learners and coaches map progress towards reaching community-defined goals. This vision is only enabled by an unbundled learning ecosystem.
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Recommendations
Solutions already exist in the ecosystem and need to be combined and scaled. Funding models (like My Tech High), badging/credentialing at the competency level (like VLACS), coaching models (like Big Thought), and open ecosystems (like NH Learn Everywhere) provide an excellent foundation. Thus, building unbundled systems has already begun but needs systemic changes to become widely available and accepted.
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- Build a robust competency-based system.
- Create a two-way marketplace for unbundled learning.
- Implement policy to support credit for out-of-system experiences.
- Invest in technology infrastructure for Learning and Employment Records.
- Design interoperable badging systems that connect to credentials.
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Colleges consider overhauling grading system for freshmen to ease transition to higher learning — from mercurynews.com by Kate Hull
Supporters say ‘ungrading’ could result in less stress and a more level playing field for students from less rigorous high schools
Excerpt:
Dubbed “weed-out” or “gatekeeper” classes, they can be dream-crushing for many students — especially those hoping to enter the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. And a growing body of research says the courses can be particularly discriminatory toward historically excluded groups such as Latinos and Black and Indigenous people.
One possible remedy, some educators say, is “ungrading,” a style of teaching and assessment that seeks to evaluate students in other ways besides A-F letter grades — usually just in their freshman year.
“You’re trying to move the focus from a score to the learning,” said Robin Dunkin, who teaches biology and is the assistant faculty director at UCSC’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. “For that reason, it’s immensely powerful.”
Also relevant see the #Ungrading hashtag on Twitter, from which the below item was taken:
Any educators out there who are #ungrading in a standards-based grading school district? I’ve been studying @Jessifer’s work for a bit & I’d love to go full-implementation next year.
If you have any experience, let me know. I’d love to pick your brain! https://t.co/ClnwZsBdl9
— Adrian Neibauer, EdD (@MrNeibauer) January 25, 2023
Excerpts from Jesse Stommel’s Ungrading: an Introduction presentation:
Also relevant/see Robert Talbert’s Grading for Growth.
The academic career is broken — from chronicle.com by Hannah Leffingwell
Excerpt:
We are in the midst of a crisis in academe, to be sure, but it’s not an economic crisis. It’s a crisis of faith. The question is not just whether our institutions pay faculty fairly, but whether any wage is worth the subservience and sacrifice that modern higher ed requires. Too often, colleges perceive themselves as voluntary, meritocratic institutions dedicated to a “higher” moral purpose. Or, as one of the characters in Babel puts it: “The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not.”
Have these strikes solved the central paradox of academe: a capitalist institution that claims it is above capitalism while exploiting students, faculty, and staff for financial gain? No, they have not.
It gives me no pleasure to say that the system I have dedicated my entire life to is broken — that it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Also related to careers and higher education, see:
36% of higher ed supervisors are looking for other work, study finds — from highereddive.com by Laura Spitalniak
Excerpt:
Over a third of higher education supervisors, 36%, are likely to look for a new job in the next year, according to a new survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, CUPA-HR. And only 40% said they were interested in finding employment opportunities at their current institution.
Job Titles: It’s Not Only Instructional Design — from idolcourses.com by Ivett Csordas
Excerpt:
When I first came across the title “Instructional Designer” while looking for alternative career options, I was just as confused as anybody would be hearing about our job for the first time. I remember asking questions like: What does an Instructional Designer do? Why is it called Instructional Design? Wouldn’t a title such as Learning Experience Designer or Training Content Developer suit them better? How are their skill sets different from curriculum developers like teachers’? etc.
Then, the more I learnt about the different roles of Instructional Designers, and the more job interviews I had, ironically, the less clarity I had over the companies’ expectations of us.
The truth is that the role of an Instructional Designer varies from company to company. What a person hired with the title “Instructional Designer” ends up doing depends on a range of factors such as the company’s training portfolio, the profile of their learners, the size of the L&D team, the way they use technology, just to mention a few.
From DSC:
I don’t know a thing about idolcourses.com, but I really appreciated running across this posting by Ivett Csordas about the various job titles out there and the differences between some of these job titles. The posting deals with job titles associated with developers, designers, LXD, LMS roles, managers, L&D Coordinators, specialists, consultants, and strategists.
16 Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
17 Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.
From DSC:
Obviously, all of this goes for me as well. I constantly thank the LORD for His patience with me as well as His grace and forgiveness. I often seek His help, wisdom, and strength. Anyway, the above verse caught my eye due to Isaiah’s focus on justice and to seeing that justice is had by all.
And those reflections caused me to think about what the church is all about — at least for me. This brought to mind an old pastor friend of mine who once exclaimed, “The church is a hospital.”
Wow. That thought hit me powerfully. And you know what? I agree with him.
“The church” is a place for “sick” people who are in need of hope, healing, teaching, support, forgiveness, grace, love, wisdom, community, and more. Besides a place to worship the LORD, those are some of the reasons why I continue to go to church.
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
Along these lines, I’m trying to figure out what the LORD wants me to do (during this next year and beyond). I want to make a contribution. For those who pray out there, I could use your prayers on where He wants me to plug in.
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? — from tedgioia.substack.com by Ted Gioia
Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.
But I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple.
If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.