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Learning without Boundaries for Univ Students

Explore and develop a recognition and accreditation practice and methodology for students' learning activities beyond university campus.

Photo of Cedric Wang
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The vision is trying to explore and develop a series of recognition and accreditation practice and methodology for students' learning activities beyond university campus, including but not limited to MOOCs and social activities, to extend university students' channels of knowledge access. With this vision, university students could learn from outside materials (e.g. MOOCs from other universities or even in other languages) and any social learning activities.

There are some universities have already tried recognizing MOOC courses' Statement of Accomplishment as credit for "elective course", contributing to only 1% of the total credits a student needed for graduation. It normally does not affect any mandatory courses, and even harder for social learning activities to be taken into consideration.

The idea (or say potential solution) is to build a team of evaluators and reviewers, under the Department of Academic Affairs in a university. They are responsible for evaluating the quality of outside courses or social learning experiences submitted by students - or recommend any to their students.

They could internally develop a working (recognition) process, and using any criteria or rubrics (e.g. QM - QualityMatters) to judge the quality of the outside courses or learning activities proposed.

Who is your idea designed for and how does it reimagine higher education to support the needs of tomorrow?

Department of Academic Affairs, in Universities. If this idea comes true, students could have more chances (contributing up to 30% of their total credit) to learn from a broaden horizon outside university campus.

This idea emerged from:

  • A group brainstorm
  • An individual

What skills, input or guidance from the OpenIDEO community would be most helpful in building out or refining your idea?

- To what extend do you think a university will consider adopting it. - How to balance the credibility and flexibility of universities' educating quality. - Consider any side-effects which could benefit universities, and make them more willing to adopt it.

What early, lightweight experiment might you try out in your own community to find out if the idea will meet your expectations?

As a researcher interested in MOOC, we have once researched and found out that a few of Chinese universities have already tried recognizing MOOC courses' Statement of Accomplishment as credit for "elective course", generally speaking - up to 3 credits overall.

Tell us about your work experience:

Cedric (Rongsheng) WANG is currently working as a research assistant at the Service Design Institute at Tsinghua University. Cedric is an experienced MOOC practitioner. As a MOOC professional, he achieved the EDUCAUSE certificate for blended learning designer, and was involved in the course design, operation and management for a number of MOOC courses at Tsinghua University. As a MOOC learner, he has completed more than 50 MOOC courses on a variety of topics. www.linkedin.com/in/bestcedric

Inspired by (1)

Degreed
Degreed

This inspired (1)

Higher Education as A Human Centered Service Built Around Industry Partnerships
Higher Education as A Human Centered Service Built Around Industry Partnerships

4 comments

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Photo of Kate Rushton
Team

Hi Cedric, Thank you for sharing your idea. Have you seen CredEd and What if the Facebook business model was adapted to MOOCs? ? Are they close to what you envisage? Is there room for collaboration with these ideas and ideators? Also, Degreed mentioned in the research phases might be of interest.

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Photo of Cedric Wang
Team

Thank you for your comment, Kate.

I have read through the 3 links you mentioned, found it useful for reference and something can also be learnt from:

The Degreed platform could be the outcome surface of my idea - tracking and recording students' informal & formal learning experiences. I have just signed-up an account of Degreed, haven't explored enough of its function, not sure how can it measure the quality of the learning experience - which could also be the main challenge for University Academic Administrators.

From the FB business model idea, I think the ideas and skills requirements from job posting companies could also benefit the university on setting the education programs for students.

I found the company (Aspiring Minds) mentioned in the idea of CredEd is quite inspiring - universities could develop a similar "adaptive assessment platform" to exam students skills for accreditation of their learning experiences outside university campus.

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