Effort:Outcomes
June 30th, 2010 at 16:33In our ongoing work on alternative routes to accreditation, it has become clear that the solutions we provide are going to require a “contract” of sorts with P2PU course participants who desire these higher-value outcomes. I have tried to visually capture the relationship between effort and outcomes in the diagram below.
The “Low-value, high effort” section is presumably of no interest to anyone. We have sayings for this section, like “counting grains of sand on a beach,” and the like.
The “High-value, low effort” section is mostly a fiction, though I would argue that this is essentially what our current higher educational system promises to people. Actually, the promise is more akin to “You have already put in your time, money, and effort – reap the rewards of your performance to date by coming here, acquiring our good brand, and benefiting accordingly.” Note that this category requires that some entity vouch for the quality of the learning outcomes because there is little or nothing more to go on. I would say that P2PU should take pains to avoid this category; it’s a rat hole.
It is the “Value mostly reflects effort” section which is most interesting, and most relevant for P2PU. The key is to develop and honor an honest contract of sorts between P2PU and course participants whereby each party understands what is actually expected of them. For participants, this means recognizing that the “value” of a P2PU course will depend substantially on the person’s ambitions and effort. For P2PU, it means not promising that which cannot be offered; even if P2PU is not the accrediting agent, it is still necessary to facilitate passage towards accreditation if a claim is made that such a thing is possible with P2PU courses.
Thoughts?
July 1st, 2010 at 3:09 pm
[...] get more out of courses and how much of what they want is their responsibility to see through. My recent post on the effort:outcomes relationship considers this challenge more [...]
July 6th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Hi Ahrash,
this is a very interesting discussion, but I am not sure I agree. Ideally, if we had a very robust accreditation system, then I should be able to get a certain accreditation with ease, if I already had those skills. This is, to me, the difference between an evaluation system (focusing on course quality), and an accreditation system. An evaluation system should look at value added, how much more did the students learn in this course? An accreditation system, on the other hand, focuses on what the student knows (or is able to do), and is not necessarily related to how they gained that knowledge and skills.
This is all the more true at P2PU, where people will come with very widely diverging backgrounds, levels of expertise and skills. If in an English lit course a PhD student and someone who had never read more than Donald Duck participated, imagine the following scenario: the Donald Duck student really gets inspired, exerts himself, makes huge progress. The PhD student is snooty and surfs through. There is no doubt that the Donald Duck student has been the “best student”, and should get a gold-star for the effort and improvement (as should the course organizer be commended on inspiring and supporting the person’s growth). However, if the question was, who would you hire to teach Chaucer, the answer might still be the English lit PhD student. Same for programming.
July 14th, 2010 at 12:57 am
Hi Stian,
I basically agree with your comment, but it is also not really relevant to the post. The post does not really address the question of how P2PU might actually credit particularly skills/knowledge/competencies/what-have-you. It simply illustrates that higher-value accreditations, presumably of more important, difficult, and desirable competencies, requires greater effort from the learner. That effort may have been expended prior to arriving to P2PU, but it was expended nonetheless. Even if someone is exceptionally talented (think of art, or music), there is still substantial work involved in obtaining external validation of that talent.
I think the point of confusion, and I admit that it is a tricky thing to navigate, is that we all agree that prior skills should count, somehow, towards relevant credits. As you say, if we are awarding points for expertise, then the points should flow to the experts no matter if they arrived fully formed or built themselves from scratch in P2PU. But we are not yet in the business of awarding credit in this manner, and I am not sure how easily this can actually be done for a project like P2PU. I think we would need to set up a system, probably supported by a fee, where people can “challenge” to obtain a particular accreditation and then provide supporting documentation or other data to support their claim. Someone, or several someones, will then need to evaluate the claim. There are already organizations that do this, and all of them rest on some form of formal review and/or qualifying exams that serve to verify the prior knowledge. It seems unlikely that this sort of approach could ever be used to evaluate softer skills, which are our primary interest currently for P2PU.
Absent that, what P2PU does offer is the potential for repeated and meaningful engagement with peers on publicly viewable projects. Thus, we can imagine setting up a system whereby people will, if they put in the time/effort, be able to accrue sufficient data to claim competency in some area. This claim is blind to prior learning in the sense that you need not have learned everything in P2PU, but you do have to build a sufficient portfolio in P2PU to garner the credit.
Anyway, much to ponder, and I think it would be interesting to explore the distinction between evaluation and accreditation systems in more detail.