Source: Parents Win a Victory over SEL Educrats, But the War Isn’t Finished Yet | The National Pulse

If 2012 was “The Year of the MOOC”—massive open online courses, usually offered for free—2017 could be “The Year of the Microcredential.”

A growing number of elite colleges are offering short-form graduate and certificate programs that can be taken online for a fraction of the price of a traditional master’s. Proponents say the new offerings will expand access to graduate education and help workers update their skills in fast-changing fields. But the programs also serve as an example of how colleges, increasingly thinking like businesses, are eager to find new ways to bring in revenue.

EdX, the nonprofit founded by Harvard University and MIT to offer MOOCs, now lists 40 “MicroMasters” programs from 24 colleges and universities around the world. And Coursera, the venture-backed startup that also works with colleges to develop online courses, says it has added 50 new “specializations” (series of courses that add up to a noncredit certificate) in the past year.

In some ways the offerings are similar to university extension programs that have been around for more than a century, says Mitchell Stevens, associate professor of education at Stanford University. “Elite universities have created alternative credentials for a long time,” he says. “All universities tend to grow toward new sources of revenue.”

The move to try new types of online degrees and certificates is part of what Stevens calls a “recapitalization” of the higher-education sector, as state and federal support fades and Silicon Valley-companies and foundations move in with greater influence.

A pioneer of these new online degrees has been MIT, which offered its first MicroMasters degree in 2015, in conjunction with EdX, in supply chain management. The program follows the same curriculum as MIT’s in-person master’s program, except that it covers only about 30 percent of that material (which is why it’s a “micro” degree). That means students take five courses (and pay $1,000 in fees) to get the MicroMasters. There’s no admissions process, so if a student can do the work, he or she can earn the credential. And for students in the online program who do well enough to gain admission to MIT’s in-person master’s, the online credits transfer, making that degree less expensive.

The program recently graduated its first batch of online students, and so far the supply chain MicroMasters has brought in more than $4-million in revenue, according to Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX. That money is split between MIT and EdX, which provides the platform and marketing for the courses. EdX also gets foundation support for its new credentials: The group won a $900,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation to help it create 30 “low-cost, open-admissions MicroMasters certificate programs.”

Agarwal says there are three primary reasons why the colleges that EdX works with are trying out the MicroMasters degrees. One is that they just want to try something new. Another is that they see it as a way to market their in-person graduate programs. (After all, paying for marketing and advertising to recruit students is a fast-growing cost for colleges, and building free and low-cost courses may appeal to colleges more than buying Google ads.) Third, colleges “want to create new revenue streams,” says Agarwal, and online courses allow them to reach a broader audience, especially internationally.

When deciding what subjects to offer MicroMasters in, “the marketability of the topic matters a lot,” says Agarwal. Though EdX is a nonprofit, it prides itself on operating like a Silicon Valley startup.

The refrain of thinking more like a business is an even stronger refrain at for-profit companies helping colleges set up new online programs. One such company, ExtensionEngine, urges colleges to go through a “mindset shift” when thinking of new degrees online. “Instead of approaching it as an effort to re-create an existing in-person course into an online program, [schools should] take a cue from some of the most successful online businesses,” says Michael DiPietro, chief marketing officer at ExtensionEngine. They have to “start with a business plan—one that outlines the market, learner personas, competition, revenue and cost projections, team and operational resources, ecommerce, positioning, differentiators, and more. Your product—the program, course, certificate, or degree—has to be unique and very specific to what your market wants.”

In some cases, though, university extension programs have started working with Silicon Valley startups to build new types of online credentials.

One example is the University of California at Davis Extension, which offers five “Specializations” through Coursera. Specializations grant noncredit certificates to students who take a series of short online courses on a given topic. They’re different than MicroMasters in that they usually can’t be transferred for college credit, but they represent a new kind of credential that can be completed quickly and for a low price. The latest Davis specialization, in market research, involves taking four courses (which take about four weeks each), and students pay a monthly Coursera subscription of $49 per month while they are taking the courses if they want a certificate showing completion.

Linda Behrens, associate dean of online education at University of California at Davis, says she sees the certificates as similar in spirit to what the extension program has long offered. She was also careful to note that it is not intended to replace a graduate degree.

But Coursera’s leaders recently unveiled a strategy to make their subscription feel more like an employment-boosting service, complete with diagnostics and assessments that matching its customers (which it calls “learners”) with courses and offerings on the service to advance their careers.

Other startups have cut out colleges completely to offer similar microcredentials and services. The largest is Udacity, founded by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, which offers what it calls “nanodegrees,” to students who pay $200 a month for access to the education service. The company works closely with high-tech companies to develop its courses. And it offers a premium service (for $299 a month) that includes some individualized help and mentorship, for an additional fee. It also promises a money-back guarantee for those who successfully complete a nanodegree and don’t find a job within six months. It’s fair to say that extension programs never used such decidedly market-based efforts as a money-back guarantee.

Mitchell Stevens, the Stanford education professor, says that other colleges are likely weighing whether they should jump in. The biggest risk for an institution like Stanford and other big-name institutions is the potential to undermine their existing brands. “The most valuable thing that universities have is their reputation,” he says. “The more prominent you are in the reputational economy, the more you have to lose.”

He says that there’s an “ongoing negotiation” around credentials right now. “It’s not about the status order among schools,” he says, “but it’s the status order among credentials.” In other words, which flavor of online graduate degree or certification will employers end up valuing?

Jeffrey R. Young (@jryoung) is a senior editor for EdSurge.

Source: More Colleges Are Offering Microcredentials—And Developing Them The Way Businesses Make New Products | EdSurge News

In the fall issue of Thinking Minnesota, Katherine Kersten offers a deep-dive look into the social justice activism that is beginning to take hold in many of America’s schools. And so far the results have not been pretty.

Kersten, an attorney and a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, shows that one of the nation’s celebrated school districts – Edina Pubic Schools (EPS), a wealthy school system in Minnessota – has witnessed a steady decline in academic performance in recent years, as schools have shifted educational focus from traditional curricula to social justice advocacy.

Minnesota Department of Education statistics reveal steep declines in reading and math proficiency following the district’s adoption of “All for All,” Kersten writes, an initiative that rests on the premise that systemic racism is the primary force behind the achievement gap between white and minority students. The initiative, adopted in 2013, explicitly stated that all learning and teaching in the district’s schools would be through a “lens of racial equity.”

“In sum,” Kersten writes, “the All for All plan seeks to groom students, parents, and teachers to be agents of social change.”

Many parents (speaking off the record) voiced concerns over the initiative. And rightly so, Kersten contends:

“Instead of giving Edina students the intellectual tools necessary to thrive in the 21st century, Edina public school leaders are increasingly using limited school time to indoctrinate students in left-wing political orthodoxies.

Today, for example, K-2 students at Edina Highlands Elementary School are learning—through the ‘Melanin Project’—to focus on skin color and to think of white skin as cause for guilt. ‘Equity’ is listed as a primary criterion on the district’s evaluation for K-5 math curricula.

At Edina High School, teachers are haranguing students on ‘White Privilege,’ and drilling into them that white males oppress and endanger women. In a U.S. Literature and Composition class, 11th-graders are being taught to ‘apply marxist [sic], feminist’ and ‘post-colonial’ ‘lenses to literature.’

In short, in Edina, reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills are taking a backseat to an ideological crusade.”

The district’s commitment to social justice goes beyond classroom instruction, it’s worth pointing out.

As part of the initiative, the district adopted policies that also changed its hiring practices. It announced that going forward it would “recruit, hire and retain high-quality, racially conscious teachers and administrators” (emphasis mine).

What precisely is a “racially conscious” teacher or administrator? That is unclear; but presumably this would be employees and prospective employees who have social activism on their resumes.

This is troubling on multiple levels.

First, such a policy would seem to disadvantage job seekers who are not “racially conscious”—those who are mere educators and are not actively involved in social justice politics.

Second, such a policy could potentially politicize classrooms, marginalizing students and teachers who are skeptical of “racial equity” and simply believe all people should be treated equally. This certainly appears to have happened in at least some of Edina’s schools, where students and teachers reportedly were openly crying following the 2016 presidential election and chants of F*** Trump compelled some Trump-supporting students to leave school.

The truth is, as my colleague Daniel Lattier has noted, not all parents want their children to be “social justice warriors.” Many just want their children to receive adequate educations, something public schools increasingly are having a difficult time delivering.

It also bears asking: Do we really want to be making children more conscious of race and class? Could such policies have the unintended consequence of creating more racial division?

Moral education of this sort appears strikingly similar to the class consciousness Aldous Huxley envisioned in his dystopian novel Brave New World. Is that a road we really wish to travel?

—

[Image Credit: Flickr-Sage Ross | CC BY SA 2.0]

This post Schools Are Now Seeking ‘Racially Conscious’ Teachers was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Miltimore.