Perhaps the goals of access, equity and quality are too vague - what are we really trying to achieve? If we are trying to address the global need for higher education - the gap of 150 million more college graduates 1 that Sir John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning talks about “-then we need to think beyond traditional, formal higher education institutions as the means to closing the gap. We need to focus on the end goal - human development.
One solution is to bridge formal and informal learning. In the U.S., nearly 13% of all adults who use the Internet have taken an online class. The Pew Internet for Life 2 project, estimates that 160 million adults use the internet and that 20.8 million say they have taken an online course for personal enrichment or fun. That total is significantly higher than those participating in higher education. Likewise, OER's biggest users, according to the MIT data, are self-learners. What can we do to help these self-learners 3 earn a degree? For decades, adult-serving institutions have been enabling learners to maximize their experience for transfer credit. We can look to them for models.
A model in the form of a virtual university is the Western Governor's University 4 (WGU). Celebrating 10 years and 8,000 students, WGU is one model that did come out of the 90's heyday of online learning's promise. It is a competency-based assessment-only university accredited by four of the six accrediting bodies in the U.S. (an innovation in itself). To earn your degree, you work with an advisor and a rigorous assessment process to demonstrate that you've achieved the knowledge, skills and behaviors required by the competencies defined for your degree. Following in the footsteps of other adult-serving institutions, it doesn't matter how you earned the knowledge, but that you can provide evidence of your achievement.
Another model for bridging formal and informal has been proposed by Jim Taylor at the University of Southern Queensland. Taylor describes a concept for an Open Courseware University. 5 In this model, selflearners using OER from Open Courseware Consortium 6 members would be supported by volunteer tutors and gain credit on-demand from providing institutions. Credits earned in this way from various institutions would be aggregated by a new mechanism that would award accredited degrees. This model lowers costs and increases scalability by using innovations in academic support and accreditation to leverage online learning using OER.
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