Serendipity35

A colleague forwarded me a link to an article online with the title "Degrees don’t matter anymore, skills do."  She said she thought it might be good blog fodder for me because "you have written about this before." Have I written about this?

The article is by Miles Kimball, a professor at the University of Michigan, and it is about a transformation of education. I suppose it might fall under my category here on the blog of "School 2.0" which looks at big trends that are often said to be "transformational." Kimball starts with some "destructive beliefs" about education and learning. He considers some of those beliefs to be that:  "some people are born smart and others are born dumb; those who get low test scores think they are just not as smart and avoid tough majors that lead to some of the best jobs; talent is innate."

I would agree that those are destructive beliefs, but I'm not sure how dominant they are in our educational culture today. He references the 1964 experiment by Harvard psychology professor Robert Rosenthal that I learned about in an education course back in the 1970s. When Rosenthal told teachers that certain students were about to have a growth spurt in their IQ, those students did show an increase in IQ to a greater degree than other students. The key to the experiment was that those students identified as having that spurt were chosen completely at random. The conclusion was that when the teacher believed the students could succeed, they made conscious or unconscious choices that changed the way they treated those students.

The article touches on many trends that I have written about here, such as using technology, flipped learning, the innovative university, Christensen's ideas about innovation and teachers as coaches and motivators.

All this leads Kimball to say that one other force will propel the transformation of education: "a shift from credentials to certification." This particular force may be picking up more energy the past few years as we saw MOOCs, competency-based programs and other trends that questioned educational institutions' emphasis on diplomas and degrees. Credentials, measured in credit hours, seat time and exam scores, are probably being questioned more today than ever before - although they have been questioned throughout the history of formal education.

The issue with certificates and other alternatives continues to be how to "credibly attest to someone’s ability." Even in some innovative alternatives to credentials, the measures seem to return to the old measures, like testing, because other methods, like performance, are so difficult to use.

I think I agree with the ideas in the article, and I agree that skills are important. But I also feel that School 2.0 is still as far away as the Jetsons' flying cars. Today, degrees still matter. Perhaps, the next phase will be somewhere between - degrees that better reflect skills and abilities and are less a show of evidence that you have paid enough tuition, sat through enough classes and done enough coursework to indicate that you are ready to be promoted to the world of work or the next degree.