University of Oregon

APLU Project Site

from the APLU project site

http://www.aplu.org/InstitutionalConsortium

APLU Institutional Consortium Project 

Overview

APLU has received a [$268,920] grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to explore the creation of an independent, self-governing, non-profit higher education consortium for institutional cooperation and collaboration.  Technology is rapidly changing the way students access information and the way they learn.  A consortium would be in a position to capture the great economies of scale inherent in information technology to improve learning for students while containing costs.

The grant will support conceptual design and initial formation of a consortium. APLU hopes to achieve agreement on a design and commitment in principle to membership from a large number of institutions, including universities and community colleges, by the summer of 2013. There is also modest funding to support faculty specification of content for up to six courses, although not enough at this moment for actual course development.

Expansion of Learning Technology

The field of courseware and data analytics supporting student learning is in rapid flux. Growing numbers of students have taken advantage of interactive learning with online materials in a variety of modalities, including “course redesigns” (see www.thencat.org/), open educational resources, and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). In 2012 MIT/Harvard’s EdX, Coursera, and Udacity made headlines and received national attention for large scale free-access MOOCs. In November 2012, the Gates Foundation funded a number grants concentrating on MOOCs, including one to the American Council on Education to do research and evaluate the academic potential of MOOCs and their credit-worthiness.

“Free” MOOCs have demonstrated impressively the power of technology and the Internet to provide access to education for a vast global student audience.  In this era of social media reaching hundreds of millions, it should not be surprising that free online courses can sign-up tens of thousands.  For anyone interested in a course topic, a new window to learning has opened: signing up is easy and the commitment ultimately optional.  Still to be resolved are a number of issues concerning how MOOC experiences will fit into a coherent framework of learning leading to a credible degree or certificate, including: interaction with other students, breadth and depth of learning, authentication of student participation, proctoring of exams, standards and adequacy of assessment. Very importantly, under what conditions can a free MOOC offered by one institution be given academic credit at another, and how will a MOOC articulate with other courses within a program of coursework leading to a degree?

Cooperation and Collaboration to Achieve Scale

MOOCs illustrate an essential point about information technology as the medium for creating learning experiences: Scale matters.  If high-quality interactive online learning materials can be developed for a small group, they can be made available to great numbers at comparatively little extra cost.  The marginal cost per additional student is extremely low. To achieve scale by reaching students at many different institutions, however, there must be some degree of cooperation, even if it is nothing more than an agreement to use a common electronic textbook, for example.

The APLU grant is to demonstrate that cooperation can be achieved among institutions of higher education so that electronic course wares can be acquired or developed that will enhance students’ learning experiences. The consortium envisioned would have as members non-profit degree-granting institutions and would focus on course wares for credit-bearing courses that count toward a degree.  The grant provides funds to explore the possibilities of cooperation in two ways: first administratively, through the design of an institutional consortium to facilitate multi-institutional collaborations and the sharing, licensing, or acquisition of electronic course materials; second and simultaneously, through demonstration of cross-institutional faculty cooperation and the development of mutually agreed-upon course descriptions for a number of large enrollment courses.

Design of an Institutional Consortium

We will engage administrative leaders from many institutions to see if a formal framework can be created, bring to the fore mutual interests, and simplify the process of collaboration.  Our starting suggestion is an independent consortium that might carry out a limited number of important functions, such as testing, selecting, reviewing, licensing, and influencing the evolution of course wares.  APLU will explore the concept and stimulate cooperation, but the consortium is intended to be stand-alone, with its own governance and destiny as determined by its members.  Those members should include community colleges, four-year institutions, as well as research universities. Under the umbrella of the consortium, there may be specific agreements for focused investment and collaboration among smaller subset of similar institutions.  The consortium’s role might be to facilitate sharing and licensing to leverage investments by members whenever possible.  With the guidance of an advisory committee, we will engage in exchanges and discussions to find what form of consortium might best serve the interests of higher education members.  Once preliminary work has been done and the outlines of the charter for a consortium laid out and generally endorsed, a by-invitation conference will be held to hammer out agreement and gain commitments in principle to join the consortium as defined.

  • If your institution would like to have a suitable representative participate in the consortium design, please have your chief academic officer contact Michael Tanner, APLU Vice President for Academic Affairs, to register institutional interest (mtanner@aplu.org, 202-478-6083) and provide contact information for the representative (email address, telephone number, professional website URL if available).

Faculty Collaboration for Course Specification

We invite faculty groups with interest in specific course areas to discuss content and produce detailed description of a course in each area as well as the assessments giving evidence of the desired learning in general terms.  Each group will be led by a faculty member chosen by the project advisory committee based on prior experience, expressed interest in the project, and qualifications to lead the course specification effort.  Faculty who participate should be primed to adopt the course wares if and when funding for full course development is identified.  The course discussions are to begin by the end of January, and the specification of the desired course, including description assessments of learning or outcomes, should be completed over a five-month period.

A previous APLU grant elicited interest from faculty at both community colleges and universities in developing six introductory courses: Biology (one for majors, one for non-majors), Pre-Calculus, Psychology, Economics, and English Composition. Those areas are presumed to be the targets for this course specification effort.  We are open coordinating course specifications in other subject areas if a sufficient number of institutions can be involved. The APLU grant has modest funding (~$10,000) to allow a lead organizing faculty member’s home institution to compensate the faculty member and any support staff and defray incidental costs.  All the projects undertaken will be collectively coordinated by an APLU staff member.

If the course needs common to many institutions can be expressed with adequate clarity, the proposed consortium can be the mechanism for licensing or creating a preferred learning technology.  The nature of the technology to employ should emerge from the process and not be pre-determined.  Given how quickly the field is moving, there may be new options even six months from now. Funding for the actual electronic course material development may come eventually from granting agencies or from the consortium itself.

  • Faculty members who would like participate in course specification discussions should send a brief statement of their interest to coursewares@aplu.org: the course project area (one of six above or another), whether they would like to be considered to lead and organize the course specification activity or just participate, and their contact information (email address, telephone number, professional website URL if available).  The faculty member’s institution must be a participant in the consortium discussion for the faculty to join a course specification project.

Quick Summary:

  • Information technology is rapidly changing the way students learn and how they interact with institutions, and it can improve student learning while containing costs.
  • There are great economies of scale when a common software platform and shared content can be adopted by thousands if not millions of users.
  • APLU’s project is to test the concept of non-profit higher education institutions forming a formal consortium, independent of the APLU. The consortium is to facilitate cooperation, and collaboration as necessary, to accelerate course wares development and adoption at scale. The goal is to have a sizable group of institutions participate in designing such a consortium and agree in principle to join and take advantage of it.
  • Multi-institutional faculty groups are being organized in multiple subject areas to discuss and specify course content and assessments of desired learning or outcomes, but not at this point to proceed to develop and implement the intended courses.

 

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