Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

5 ways the Common Core isn’t college-ready

New brief urges higher education, states to better align Common Core with higher ed practices

common-core-collegeCommon Core State Standards, which have been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia, are supposed to be the ultimate indicator for a student’s college readiness. But according to a new policy brief, Common Core stops at higher education’s gate, offering little to no benefit for a student’s chances of entering college.

The brief, “Common Core Goes to College: Building better connections between high school and higher education,” by Lindsey Tepe, program associate on the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program, begins her brief with a powerful metaphor, linking the blunder of Chicago’s underground tunnel to what’s currently happening with the Common Core.

In 1989, after years of planning to connect two ends of one tunnel under Chicago, the two entities, which started building the tunnel at different points, realized that one side came in nine inches too low, and eight inches to the east of the other side’s connector point.…Read More

Report: Credit-hour model outdated, inefficient

Fourteen percent of students are full-time students living on campus.

Colleges and universities are holding back a competency-based credit hour system in higher education, even as the federal government has signaled support for the nontraditional credit-earning model, according to a report that supports the growing opposition to the credit hour status quo.

The New America Foundation’s “Cracking The Credit Hour” is the latest critique of the long-held belief that college credit should be judged solely on hours spent in a classroom, whether it’s in person or online.

Penned by the foundation’s director of higher education, Amy Laitinen, the foundation’s report points out that traditional universities have stuck with the seat-time credit hour model despite the U.S. Department of Education’s definition of credit hours, which was based on 1,200 comments from educators and includes three ways to measure learning outcomes.…Read More