Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This report should be read if only for the fascinating account of the history of the Carnegie Unit - now known as the 'credit hour' - as a unit of academic measurement. Inside Higher Ed summarizes the rest of the report concisely: "The credit hour is an inadequate unit for measuring student learning. Yet no better replacement for higher education's gold standard has emerged, and getting rid of it right now would be risky." I remember back in the 90s writing that time would be replaced as the unit of academic instruction. I thought it would be replaced with knowledge units. But what is a knowledge unit? A competency? This requires a focus on assessment, but as the report authors write, "a great deal of very difficult design, development, and improvement work needs to be done to build the standards and assessments required to make education more transparent and to transform emerging design innovations from compelling concepts to sources of educational rigor at scale."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 7:14 p.m.

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