You know, I'm sort of struck. I think sometimes the The best big ideas are the ones that after you hear them you think oh Yeah, duh that is exactly the way you should be thinking about it And I would I would put this conversation into that category that something that everyone has taken for the duh category But but but I but I do think it's the case that sometimes The most the biggest the biggest ideas are the most obvious one So yeah, it'll be interesting to hear this panel talk about it a little bit We're lucky to have Libby Nelson of the new Vox here formerly of Politico I think all of us are carefully following Vox and your success and with avid excitement Amy Leighton from our own staff. This is her idea and One that she talks about a lot. She's she's a lively speaker and we're also very lucky to have I'll pronounce her on Kathrail Cazen and how plot can I'm gonna let Libby do all of the formal introductions, but it's a great Great panel ahead of you. So enjoy So before we get started as she said I'm the education reporter for Vox.com We're a month old and it's been a lot of fun So if you are reading and supporting us and watching our success, I am grateful for that if you're not I hope you will Next to me is Hal plotkin a senior policy advisor at the education department Next to hell is Amy the deputy director for higher education policy at New America and a former policy advisor at the White House and at the education department and At the end we have Kate Cazen of College for America a new competency based education model at Southern New Hampshire University Which is a private university in New Hampshire Before we get started talking about measuring learning and not time I want to talk a little bit briefly about who college students are today because I think that's something That a lot of people misunderstand and that's crucial to this conversation and to so many of the conversations I'm covering and I'm having around higher education Most of the people here and most of the people paying attention to this conversation Probably went to college right out of high school. You probably went to a four-year college and you probably earned your degree there People who do that are less than 30% of the college student population in the United States right now And people who are doing that at the selective or highly selective colleges that we spend a lot of time Reading about and talking about or an even smaller proportion than that So there's this growing conversation and growing debate about how we serve the other 71% of these so-called non-traditional college students who are a growing majority Both on campus online anywhere else you're delivering higher education At the same time there are questions about the affordability of a college degree for everybody not just for non-traditional Students and the value that you're getting for your money is as you're taking on student debt and as you're going to college And what we're going to be talking about is one model that's been proposed as a solution to both of those issues Not just for non-traditional students, but for everyone else as well So I want Amy to get us started. We're talking about measuring learning and not time But I think it might be news to people that right now we measure time So what what is the system and how did it come about? Thanks, so so I want to talk about the idea Which I'm now going to call this so the big idea this big idea starts with something very small It starts with the credit hour and I'm assuming most people in this room have experience with credit hours You might have paid for some you might be paying for some now if you have students in college You probably took some you know how it works you go to class you amass a certain amount user you pass go Normally if you have 120 credits you get your degree and you move on So we're all pretty familiar with that what you may not be familiar with is the history of The credit hour and also the fact that the seemingly innocuous benign little unit is actually Responsible for or has at least enabled some of the real quality problems that we have in higher education So with that we need to go back to the the beginning of the credit hour when it was born Back to the days of Andrew Carnegie the steel magnet and philanthropist so at the time in the late 1800s he was Trusty Cornell University and he was sort of distraught because he saw all of these Faculty members professors who didn't make enough money to save for retirement So they were working well past their prime well past the time that was good for them or their students I mean some of them literally dying at their podiums. He thought this is no way to again to run things So he did what any of us would do when confronted with a policy problem He took 10 million of his own dollars and he created a free pension fund for Professors and he set up the Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching specifically to administer that I had no idea it was set up to be a pension facilitator so He did that and the the foundation basically needed a way to figure out who was going to be in and out of the pension system And so they decided that only full-time faculty would qualify for the pensions and full-time was they decided it was faculty members who taught at least 12 credit units a Semester and so that was faculty who had 12 contact hours with students per week So it was really designed to figure out who was going to get the free money wasn't designed for anything else But we very quickly used it for a variety of things. I'm including, you know class scheduling now We use it for compliance. We use it for financial aid We use it for variety of things was never intended to be used for and the real problem is that it became a sort of de facto Proxy of learning and it's a measure of learning and the Carnegie Foundation early on said no no no This is not about learning people. This is about time faculty student time. This isn't about results attain Please don't use it for for learning, but we couldn't help ourselves because it's easy to measure It's easy to understand. It's easy to count and so we took this sort of seemingly standardized unit and made it the bedrock of higher education and I say seemingly standardized because when we think about it as a unit of learning It is not at all standardized if it were standardized We would be able to take credits earned at one college and transfer them to another college, right? That one equals another but it doesn't work that way colleges routinely reject credits from other colleges They sometimes reject their own credits. I mean Harvard itself won't accept its own summer school courses for credit So it's you know and while this you know, it's sort of funny and it's you know It might sound silly. It's actually a huge problem because about 60% of today's college students attend more than one college So these are students who've sat in seats who've paid tuition who ostensibly have learned things and they have this little unit That's supposed to be transferable and they can't cash them in they're not they they aren't a standardized unit of currency So it's a real problem and it it sort of begs this question if colleges are rejecting these credits And if higher education doesn't trust its own credits, why should we trust them? And then I'm the bearer of bad news for a little while, but it will it will become more positive in a minute But the truth is we probably shouldn't be trusting these credits There's more and more evidence that today's college students aren't getting good educations There are I mean really shocking findings about college College outcomes that I know those of you who are currently paying for college whether or not you're paying for your loans or your Students your kids who are in college. It's a little disheartening but The recent government study found that 70% of college graduates people who have a degree Couldn't do things like compare opposing editorials And they're study after study that are showing these real big gaps in Inabilities and this might be surprising to us It's not surprising to business only 11% of business leaders think that college graduates are well prepared to succeed on the job and This is This is a real issue because as we're thinking about the global economy and we're thinking about these critical thinking skills And the skills at higher education says that it's best at right so employers are saying Not that students are coming to them with without the specific technical skills So that that may be true But they're saying they're not coming with the various skills that higher education prides itself on critical thinking writing reasoning problem-solving communication skills, so We have we have some real issues So we have an educational credit crisis. We have students who have credits who can't use them in other places We have students who have earned credits who haven't learned very much and then on the other side we have people who have learned a lot and They have a lot of knowledge But they don't have any credit support because they might have learned it in the wrong place Let's say they learned it on an online Free online course a MOOC or they learned it on the job but their learning doesn't count and As we're thinking about the global economy and how important learning is we can't afford for this to be the case anymore So what I'm excited about is that this is changing it's starting to change and Kate is going to talk about college for America And one model of measuring learning rather than time But this one model there there are many or many potential models But these models are going to remain one-offs unless federal policy changes and that's what how is going to talk a little bit about because right now the federal government spends about a hundred fifty billion dollars a year on financial aid to help students go to college But they pay for time they pay for credit hours. So but there's good news. There's some exciting stuff That's that's a foot and Yeah, so that's that's where we're at We're trying to get this big idea by getting rid of this small but somewhat pernicious little thing called the credit hour So Kate, I want you to talk a little bit to start off. Amy teed this up so well I feel like I don't have anything else to say but talk a little bit about measuring learning or in the in the more sort of Quantifiable concrete term that we use because learning is a very amorphous thing to measure measuring competency Sure. So, you know, there's a saying that if you're measuring seat time rather than learning you're measuring the wrong end of the student and I think there's a certain way in which that that's true because We continue to talk about time sort of relentlessly and the thing about time is that if you have that as the measure It's the thing you're holding standard But you're not actually you're letting learning be sort of undefined ends of squishy, right? So competency-based education tries to reverse that so it says we are going to be very specific about What we expect to see what we want our graduates to know and be able to do But the time is really irrelevant So so one of the cornerstones of competency-based education is that it is essentially time agnostic It could be self-paced. It could be self-paced within a six-month term But it's not what the focus is I would say the second focus which is really closely related to the question of making time flexible is that what matters is mastery sort of rather than grades and by mastery I mean you have a certain borrower which you've defined clearly and Students can take numerous attempts to make numerous attempts to get there But you don't have people sliding through with a C-minus as you can in a school or two. I've heard So that notion of mastery as opposed to grades of course Requires a third thing which is really defining clearly what those expectations of students are So at College for America, which as Libby said is a private not-for-profit school Which is located in New Hampshire, but our school is actually online. So it could in fact be located anywhere We've tried to tackle some of those other problems, which I think in some ways are related to the credit hour We're radically affordable in the sense that it costs twenty five hundred dollars a year all inclusive and When you think about that that means that you could get a BA for instance for ten thousand dollars which is a little bit startling right and What of the things we're doing to address some of the other issues that that were mentioned is that we're working closely with employers So in fact to be a student at College for America you need to come in through an employer or Through a community group that you're affiliated with and part of what this does is it means we don't spend a lot of money on marketing But it also means they're natural cohorts that it makes it easier for our students to make connections between the workplace and What they're doing in school? It also means that we have connections to our partners in a way that we wouldn't if the partners were simply you know writing Checks for tuition reimbursement. So our partners are range from you know big corporations like Con Agra and Duncan Donuts We we're we're pretty strong in the fast field fast food processed foods Department but to counter that we're also have strong health care partnerships with partners health care in in Boston with Penn Medicine in Philadelphia and and others and What we're trying to do is answer those questions that Amy mentioned that Every employer has if you're an employer and you've ever tried to make sense of a transcript You know that it doesn't tell you very much about learning right somebody might have a b-plus in sociology Which tells you maybe that they did better than somebody who got to be in that same section at that same school at that same time But it tells you nothing about what they know and can do So the third premise of College for America is that we care about evidence So our students actually don't take classes They don't sit for exams. They do projects and their projects are kind of real-world authentic types of experiences that enable them to demonstrate exactly what they know and can do and This combination of project work competency-based education Relationship with employers and then the ability to provide true access to our students is really powerful and these are students who Secretary Clinton talked about today Their single mothers there, you know, they work the second shift at Conagra that particular plan our first graduate actually was somebody who worked in sanitation at a slim gym factory in Troy, Ohio Somebody who never thought he would go to college who managed to finish this program in like a hundred days or something So some people hear that and say wow, that's awesome. Some people hear that and flip out And so I just want to take one second to talk about the other piece Which is although we're very focused on labor market information very clued into our partners This is a real honest-to-goodness liberal arts education our students do projects involving art involving environmental science involving literature and Some of those actually sort of gen eddish kinds of things are among the most powerful Experiences for our students many of whom have never been anywhere near an art museum or You know thought about Literature it makes it accessible to them in a way that they really didn't think was possible So I would say in many ways our students are demonstrating those key cross-cutting foundational skills like critical thinking like digital fluency like communication like So quantitative reasoning, but they're also experiencing content knowledge and a number of fields and I Think that the results are not only as good as many traditional schools, but we actually have the evidence to help Guide that discussion and that I think in the end is is one of the most Powerful things about our model. So you get you've gotten a lot of attention Certainly in the higher education press, which is a small bit Very closely a small group that's very closely watching these kinds of experiments, but also from the think tank world Foundations the kind of people who are looking at this president Obama people who are looking at this But it's partly because you there are so few people doing what you do right now And so few institutions who are able to pull this off And I'm hoping we can talk a little bit more now with hell about what the education department is doing or can do To take this model to a broader scale and what sorts of questions and concerns you're addressing along the way Thanks so much And let me take a step back to sort of Put in context why this is why this idea Is so important to so many people Including president Obama who's talked a lot about how important it is to use his words to shake up the American system of higher education He said that again just a couple of weeks ago And it ties in with one of president Obama's other main concerns, which he's been talking about a lot throughout his entire career which is Income inequality and the growing gap Between the rich and poor in our country and the social instability that that creates indeed the path that it puts us on to eventual social collapse if we don't figure out How to restore a vibrant middle class in this country and how an education and higher education in particular can be an Engine of that and we have to confront the stark reality that During this period of decades when income inequality and social inequality was growing was accompanied by a massive investment in the higher education system, which many scholars Sarah Goldrick Robb Linda Darling Hammond many others have done a very good job of tracing how our investments in higher education all too often Have ended up exacerbating the very income inequalities. They become engines of inequality rather than the engines of Equalizing opportunity that is in all of their marketing materials. So The and I can tell you I used to be in a previous life I used to be president of the Board of Trustees of a public college system and so I used to hire college presidents and College president candidates would come in to talk with us that you know They wanted the job and and I could do and I could predict it I was I would joke with my fellow trustees But how long will it take before one of the candidates talks about how their number one goal is to preserve the great traditions of our University Nobody came into the job interview saying I'm here to shake things up Everybody came in promising that they were going to do a better job of keeping things exactly the way they are then the next person and So and so we have a Gap, but mr. Who was here talking today earlier about Stagnant industries and it would be hard to find one that a more compelling case for one than higher education and the proof And the proof is in the results in the social and economic inequality That pervades our society today and that threatens to continue accelerating away from us. So In that respect, that's why we owe such a great debt and one of the real reasons I wanted to be here today was to sit next day me late in them because Because Amy used to be right down the hall from me in the Department of Education and when and a great colleague in Fighting for the kinds of reforms that we need and the kinds of things that President Obama has been talking about and when she left The department I said Amy please you know, why are you why are you leaving and she convinced me that? She might be able to have more impact on the outside than she was able to have on the inside and a year and a half later She certainly demonstrated that by raising the public understanding of The fact that the very currency that we use to measure Progress in higher education is itself Part of the problem and it's part of the problem for all of the reasons that that Amy indicated so competency the move toward competency based education is part of President Obama and Secretary Duncan's effort to shake up higher education by creating more transparency and Some of the efforts to achieve more transparency are better known for example The the attempts to make sure that students have a better understanding of what the graduation rate is at the college They're considering attending or what the average debt level is or what the average income Might be things that you would want to know to make an informed choice because While no one has been a more effective champion of higher education than President Obama and and the first lady Michelle Obama who have talked With great passion about the difference that a quality higher education made in their lives and encouraging Students to seek out a high quality education that meets their needs For for too many other students higher education is kind of like that moment in the horror film when the audience realizes that the security guard is actually the villain and That the person or force that they thought was going to save them is actually the one that's gonna gonna do them in And and to protect students from those experiences requires a lot more information a critical More atomistic part of that information is in this movement towards competency based education Which gets into a deeper level of transparency Then just what are you gonna earn?  Are you gonna have a reasonable chance of graduating? But instead what are they teaching and and what are they learning Amy made the wonderful point That colleges don't trust their own credits They don't trust the currency between the institutions and one of the main reasons for that is because they don't trust their assessments They don't trust their tests. We're not going to give you credit for math 10 Because we don't trust the tests that that professor used in that college We test for a different thing here. Of course. We're not going to show you the test because that would and so everything's behind a black box and None of the learning outcomes are transparent And so there is no fluidity between the system and very little effective competition Imagine a world for those of you for whom this may be a new concept Let me cut to the chase and then I'll be quiet and because I'm more interested in hearing others talk, but Imagine a world Everybody knows what a flight simulator is right in the military in the Navy They would never take a new pilot and give her a bubble test and then say okay you scored in 87 Here's the plane, you know, they put her in a flight simulator and And they and they put her through all kinds of different scenarios one one wing is on fire The weather's bad the engine is not working the instruments are giving the wrong readings all these kinds of things And if she can land the plane eight or ten times in those certain then they give her the keys to the three hundred million dollar airplane Well, where is the flight simulator for organic chemistry? Where is the flight simulator for physics? For biology It's very easy to imagine and vision how these kinds of open assessments could be created that would generate Dynamic random scenarios that would be transparent in the skills or aptitudes that they assess And that would be a real world marker for what a student knew or could do and if we had a few of those out in the In the in cyberspace in the in the in the world of students and learning and work That were regarded as being widely valid and reliable a reliable test if you go through this simulator four times It means you know organic chemistry Then colleges could begin to compete with each other based on how well and how inexpensively they prepare students to pass those open Assessments we would move past this black box where I'm going to hide the P and you're gonna Excuse me professor. Is that going to be on the test? Do I do I need to write that down? Well, who's ever taught a class that hasn't heard that? But if instead we had open competency-based assessments We could really change the ecosystem in higher education so that there was more of the transparency that President Obama Has been calling for so toward that end and to cut to the chase what Amy was referring to is just this past week Secretary Duncan announced what we're calling the first in the world competition Which is a 75 million dollar competition that specifically references in its preference Competency-based education and the need to develop new tools that will enable and support it That targets competency-based education at STEM disciplines and at underrepresented students at an increasing time to completion And one of the things that excites me most about it decreasing And and one of the things that's most exciting from my perspective is there's also a requirement That all of the new intellectual property produced with these first in the world grants be released with an open intellectual Property license that allows for the free use and continuous improvement of whatever those grants produce By others as long as they attribute the original creator So what we've done in the Department of Education is is is we've noticed this problem publicly We talk about it a lot and we're trying to the best of our ability to bring resources to the community so that leaders like Southern New Hampshire and Others that are moving into this space can get some of the financial resources that they need to re-engineer the higher education system so that it can begin to live up to its promise of being an engine of equality rather than Stuck in a mode where it arguably contributes to the inequalities that troubles so many of us So I have this question written in my notes as this doesn't sound like college But I was talking about it with some colleagues before I headed over here And I kind of came up with a better way to phrase it which is I think people don't necessarily understand What the online learning environment looks like now and what it looks like for the vast majority of students? And so the idea of this self-paced or accelerated You know you take the test and you prove what you know Or you you prove you can do it through a project and you move along is just Kind of mind-blowing to a lot of people who don't follow higher education So I'm hoping you can sort of explain how this does fit into the landscape of higher education as it already exists In America today and where it where it is and isn't a radical change from what is already being done So I would say that if you focus on the outcomes of higher education, which I would argue Most schools are not doing a very good job of achieving That our outcomes are actually the same or in some ways better I think the outcomes are more pertinent, but they also include all the the favorite stuff what we don't have is the You know the the half remembered discussion under the leafy trees where you sat with your professor and three other people as You know, I think you made a good point of Explaining let me that is really a fantasy about what college is for the vast majority of people in this country And so whether you were one of 500 in a lecture hall at Michigan State or whether you're You know you're you're trying to squeeze in college between, you know picking up your kid at daycare and You know trying to eat a sandwich at the same time you drive home to you know pick up the other kid Or make dinner or whatever it is That's really the reality of the majority of people who are going to school. They're not in residential campuses, right? So so I think before we say this is college or isn't college I think we have to go back to that first question about well. What really is college? I think the residential campus, which I was privileged to go to I Think serves as my president Paul LeBlanc would say, you know the coming of age drop, you know It keeps kids safe and you know and energized and in between beer, you know helps them explore what they want to do and you know And if you had that experience if you were lucky enough to have that experience, you know in addition to the loans You probably have fond memories But you know higher education is also about credentials. It also has a relationship to You know to employment and you know, many of the working adults whom we serve are You know, it's not just theoretical. I mean they definitely want their minds expanded, but they also want opportunities. They want promotions Sometimes they want to have a paycheck. That's a little bit heftier And that is what college is about for them. So I would kind of rephrase the question a little bit I'm as I said our students are reading they're exploring. They're writing their heads off But they understand why they're doing what they're doing and to house point about transparency and Assessment every one of our projects has a rubric an evaluation guide that tells students exactly what The people who review and evaluate their work are going to be looking for That's not telling them what's going to be on the test It's being transparent about what the expectations are and as a kind of recovering academic who I guess has lapsed You know, I I look back in horror at the days when I sort of I knew what I wanted But I wasn't going to tell you I mean it seems kind of insane now And you know, it was incredibly subjective and you know, I of course gravitated to the students who were most like me You know, well, that doesn't work very well. It doesn't work in employment and I don't think it works in higher education So I think transparency and evidence really need to be the watch words no matter what model we're talking about Just about the online piece. I mean, I think you know, online education is here And I not remember in the statistics right now, but many many if not the majority of students have taken at least one online course I mean, it's and it's not the the 60s. I think yeah, I think that's right So it's not just that you're taking a class You're taking everything fully online or you're on the quad and you're in the leafy campus and you're in that wonderfully socratic, you know Seminar with three people. I mean it's not either or there's a lot of sort of combination And adult students in particular have flocked to online just because of the flexibility that it provides But I think if we're talking about like your question about where is it today? It it's an important question But I think it's where can it go. So online education there I mean, there have been some advances and it's not just sort of one way delivering of knowledge You know, there's more interactivity, but I think there's a greater potential for even more I mean, I think this is where some of the adaptive learning technologies come into play that are really exciting and competency based So for those who aren't all in the weeds like like some of us are so Carnegie Mellon Has a program that it's had now for how long ten years now about ten years called the open learning initiative in which a group of Cognitive scientists and academics came together and basically said okay, how is it that people learn like how how do they learn and So the cognitive scientists said here's how they learn and then the academic said Here's what we want them to learn and they sort of work together to figure out What is it they wanted students to learn and so students can work on in this in this like this computer program essentially that And they could do it with faculty also, but they could also just do it with the computer where the the Assessment sort of figures out what it is that you know So it doesn't spend any time then teaching you what you already know And then it spends time teaching you sort of what you know and through this program it It is able to figure out not only what you don't know But how you learn and the reason that it's able to do that is because there are now hundreds of thousands of students who've taken These courses and so it's able to start to understand. Oh, here's how this person learns Here's the little hint they need in order to get to the next level So you're able to have much more personalized learning at scale and the results are better than in traditional classrooms So organic chemistry for example students who took this This approach learned as much or more than students in the traditional like in-person face-to-face courses in Half the time or less so and we know at the end of it that students have learned something And so you can see I mean in in places around the country where they're not as fortunate as Massachusetts to have University on every corner and where it's really hard for them to get organic chemistry You know professors in Montana you can sort of see that this would be very attractive to getting students the education that they need And high-quality education that they need it doesn't mean that that the technology is going to be everything and professors are going to go You know by the wayside and Bryn Maw actually has been using this as has Wesleyan And they've been using it basically to sort of say you know the faculty are saying look We have to spend the a whole semester teaching this course and getting the basics out of the way And it takes a full semester But if we incorporate this into our classrooms we can spend seven weeks doing that and the next seven weeks We can do hands-on projects and really giving students the experiences that they're actually paying for and that they're thinking about when they're Thinking about this liberal education model. So I think that there's a lot that is coming. I think You know, I think it I think we've come a long way and we have a long way to go But I think both of those things are very they're very clear what the outcomes are and students can demonstrate them We're not clear about that right now in traditional higher education. We're like, all right, we know you have credits. Good luck. Goodbye so the let me let me talk a little bit about the American opportunity in online learning Approximately 95% of the world's population right now 95% has no real access to high-quality post-secondary studies of any kind Only geographic access or how are you defining access in that context in terms of the ability for them to benefit From available Academic resources that they can practically use So they don't have access and and when they do have access what they have access to is a very poor quality You could quibble a little bit is it 92% is it 96% about 6% of the world's population has some kind of post-secondary Credential of varying levels of quality Most of the rest of everybody else are locked out from those opportunities that 90 More percent of the world's population is where the riches of our generation reside It's the key to restoring economic growth in this country and around the world To levels closer to what they were in the post-World War two Goldilocks period when Constantly expanding economy created opportunities that were more widespread But how are we going to bring post-secondary opportunities to the to the world? My friend sir John Daniel because of the demographic bulge in particular around the world There are now hundreds of millions of young people who are moving through the Primary and secondary systems and who are going to be pressed with their noses up to the glass of the post-secondary system with No place to go my friend John Daniel at the Sir John Daniel at the Commonwealth of Learning has calculated that to Meet the known need for post-secondary studies in 2025 we would have to build a new bricks-and-mortar college or university that serves 30,000 students every week for the next five years. I Don't know about you, but I didn't build a 30,000 person campus last week and I'm unlikely to build one next week So the only way that we're going to be able to begin to satisfy Some of those educational needs is by the advanced use of technology and the technology that we have in our hands today Is the internet and online learning our initial research shows that online learning is typically most effective when it's used in a hybrid setting? But that there are some Proof points that we've seen where online learning is superior and can be superior particularly with certain groups of learners in economically important Areas of education including for example learning how to build a wireless application that you can market globally Or learning Drupal or Ruby on Rails programming or things like that that are in high demand some of those things can be done arguably more effectively online right now so We're at the beginning stages still you know the internet is is not all that old I'm only 56 and I can remember when it was a fantasy And hardly a day goes by when you don't see some kind of gee whiz my goodness look what they're doing now So I think what our goal is in the in the federal government in the Obama administration is to try and encourage Evidence-based innovation and online learning And to make the fruits of those innovations the intellectual property widely available for reuse including by for-profit entities and companies that may see a way to take those Advances and turn them into products that they could sell and markets that they could develop and to and to try and Expand the promise of online learning without trying to sugarcoat it. It's certainly no panacea, but it's you know It's where the internal combustion engine was around 1904 and You know hopefully this will be less damaging to the atmosphere Than that was but in terms of its arc of development. It's it's you know still in the crib Since you mentioned that the analogy to the internal combustion engine We only have about 10 minutes So I want to keep this as brief as I can so we have time to take at least one question from the audience What do you see is the obstacles that need to be overcome or the potential pitfalls ahead in the future for a competency-based model? Well, I would say you know the federal government has been Enormously helpful in some respects and enormously supportive, but bureaucracies contain, you know vast storehouses of bureaucracy within them and Though I personally have had great Experiences with the people who do federal Financial aid policy and we were fortunate enough to be the first college Or University to receive The opportunity to give federal financial aid under that what's called the direct assessment provision The reality is that that provision which seems on the one hand to You know make it possible to give financial aid on the basis of Directly assessing what students are doing as opposed to how much time they're spending in class actually then makes you convert that very You know direct assessment into credit hours to go back to Amy's point So, you know, I think that we need You know, I think that we need to have a much more robust discussion about the role of financial aid in funding Education the role of the federal government and also there are wonderful things called experimental sites for instance And I'm hopeful that that that will enable some innovation to flourish But you know right now we're really in a kind of stuck place in which you know Some people are getting to move forward others aren't for reasons that aren't completely clear and you know We've been very fortunate But my hope is that competency-based education will be enabled more generally and not just be you know So one school or two schools or three schools Let's just to piggyback a little bit and for those who aren't as in you know in the higher ed policy world as we are I Mean I think folks think of higher education is largely not being related to the federal government because federal government has nothing to do with You know, it doesn't set standards. I mean it has really in some ways has nothing to do with higher education except for funding it So it has absolutely everything to do with it I mean again 150 billion dollars a year goes towards Pell grants and loans which students then bring to colleges and You know so the colleges can do their thing if federal financial aid dried up tomorrow almost every single college would close its doors immediately Maybe Harvard with its endowment could you know survive or what they could but for the most part Federal financial aid is what is what drives and enables colleges to be able to sort of stay open So the fact that for so long the federal government has been saying we're going to pay for credit hours rather than Learning has been really problematic and there's there's a whole bunch of you know sort of back and forth about you know The regulations and what they mean and and all of this and all of that But the reason that it's become so complicated for the federal government is the reason that it's ultimately Complicated for us and why we end up using the credit hour It's because measuring time is easy and measuring learning isn't and so when you're talking about a big federal bureaucracy and just and Stewards of federal resources where as a federal government you can't really be very nuanced you sort of have to you know You have to be clear and not clear you're going to get sued It's really sort of tricky to figure out. How is it that we would measure? Learning and does that mean big bad national standards? Does it mean a no child left behind for higher education? No No, it doesn't just so you know, it doesn't mean that but But I think that that there's really some discomfort with trying to figure out how we are how we're going to assess this Who like who determines what the competencies are? How do we know that they're valid? How do we make sure that we're not just recreating the same system where I mean right now faculty members? I mean an extreme version of faculty could say right now. Oh, we already have competency based education I'm a faculty member. I I determine what the competencies are and I Create assessments and I grade against those assessments and it's working out just fine But it's not working out fine as we've talked about earlier. So I think I think there's a few things I think federal policy needs to become more comfortable with the fact that this is an unknown space and we need to innovate We need to have some experimentation Which is exactly what as Kate said there's these things called experimental sites that now the federal government is going to allow Some of this hundred fifty billion dollars just a little bit to go towards trying to figure out how to measure learning So we're not we're not ready even though I'd like to say let's just throw out the credit I we're not ready to throw it out yet But at least we know that we need to throw it out and we need to experiment Responsibly to try to figure out how to do that. Yeah, I think Amy you both put it brilliantly that the from the speaking on behalf of the bureaucracy I'm the most unlikely bureaucrat you're likely to meet so I strange think that I'm in that position, but The the challenge is to move from one slippery rock to another slippery rock in the middle of a rushing stream and and not and and to really pay careful attention to the law of unintended consequences that in the that in a in haste to Improve a system that bear badly needs reform. We don't inadvertently create more opportunities for unscrupulous opportunists to victimize naive students and and so you know, that's a very fine line and a very difficult path to walk one of our great opportunities though as a country is going to come in the rewriting of the higher education opportunity authorization act HOA and I'm hoping that the folks here at New America and at other think tanks around the country have teams of people working on Drafting what that bill ought to look like and I can think of a couple of people that when I'm sitting right next to who would be Very capable of leading such a team But we need to redefine the federal government's role in supporting higher education There's actually a legislative opportunity coming up to do that Circumstances have changed. It's bizarre many of the things that we are Governed by in the Department of Education Related to online learning have their roots in Correspondent schools and in the rules and regulations that were set up to govern Correspondent schools you remember the the back of the matchbook that some of us grew up with and all of that and so There's a great opportunity to modernize these rules and regulations and to envision the protections for students And the consumer protections that would be valid But it's going to be a challenge to forge a bipartisan consensus on that And I think we need to start exchanging some documents across the tables As as quickly as possible in public to begin to form the bipartisan consensus that's needed To get us to the place that I think people of goodwill on both sides of the political divide agree on which is that Preserving and protecting the freedom to learn is the best possible protection for freedom itself and For those of us who are concerned with preserving and extending freedom in this world Our challenges to figure out how the United States can remain the world's classroom Into the next century We have three minutes, so I think we can take one question and we'll talk really fast Go ahead That's one of the competencies we cover and My question is for Ms. Kaysen Given that the students at your institution don't have the cues and signals that come along with a traditional academic setting How do you go about creating an alternative learning environment for them that they find? motivating engaging supportive Yeah, it's a wonderful question our mantra is technology wherever possible humans were only humans will do and a couple of the places where only humans Will do are we have learning coaches who work with students very closely actually quite quite Quite intensively and they really get to know the students And they may Skype they may talk on the phone they may email or text or whatever But those coaches are assigned to students the second they're enrolled and play a really important part in motivating and encouraging and really helping students work through Obstacles in a very concrete way the other humans who are particularly important are these Reviewers who evaluate student work and as I mentioned it's a mastery model. So each time a student submits work they get it back with that rubric filled out and Comments so students know exactly what they need to do to get closer to mastery But another important part is there's a very strong sense of community even though it's virtual so Students and and they're not you know kids. I mean these are you know people all all through the age spectrum Ask each other questions. They encourage each other and they also work on team projects because teamwork and collaboration are among the Competencies that we emphasize very strongly. So I think it's actually in some ways better than I know if you can say traditional online that sounds silly but but you know It's then the course in which you are in some ways sort of isolated. These are our students who are very much part of a learning and Sounds a little corny but growing community together and they feel it very much One minute Somebody want to sing a college fight song Fantasy football is our sport The Conversation you had reminded me a little bit of the talk that the tool gawande gave yesterday on health care And that we shouldn't be surprised when you pay for inputs that you get expensive and little innovation So the the question is how can we leverage states to much more rapidly accelerate this progress since the Vast bulk of the students were talking about are actually in public institutions in states. I Think it's a great question. I don't know if I have the answer in 23 seconds I will say this gives me a chance to talk about a worry I think more states are interested in competency based models The reasons they're interested in them though worry me a little bit I think part of the reason that folks are interested is because they think we can get cheaper faster degrees Which agreed we need cheaper faster degrees for more types of students But we also need to make sure that they're better at least knowable quality So I think that governors are certainly paying attention to this and they recognize that this is happening But I think we all need to to ensure that we're not just doing a race to the bottom of like fast cheap But that we say like that employers say, you know what we actually need folks who have these particular skills And we're gonna be looking and we're gonna be making sure that that it's focused on outputs I'll try in five seconds Transparent accurate measures of quality. All right, and we are completely out of time