Seeing things from the clouds enables you to step out of where and what you are ... and gather new information from a different perspective. AcademyOne enables new possibilities. When working together AcademyOne can help you see the landscape and horizon revealing what is common, not just what is different.
AcademyOne's resources are 100% focused on the challenges of student mobility, academic credit portability and helping learners as well as the institutions they attend, automating claim for credit, assessment, and award of credit processes. AcademyOne is building a very unique expertise framed by collaborative projects working with multi-institutional efforts to align practices and data. In turn we are also helping institutions become more student centric in the process. This is a powerful combination to help achieve our vision of making it easier for students (and their stakeholders) to evaluate learning opportunities, self-assess prior learning investments, highlight progress, and enable achievement. Impacting lives with positive reinforcement and support that is so hard to deliver in our disconnected and often busy world of distractions.
The external publication of data to guide students and the back office use of data to assess prior learning are interlinked, and are often complicated by variety of practices and tools utilized. AcademyOne is in the process of developing and evolving tools to provide structure, rigorous oversight, interactive reflection, systematic testing, templates to automate evaluations, dictionaries to track learning outcomes, workflow queues to track assignments, and synchronization with proactive efforts to publish data to guide learners. It is a wonderful vision to bridge and enable learners of all ages to navigate the differing practices employed by institutions in their assessment of students. In a sense, the “academic gps” will one day become a reality when we help stakeholders recognize the need for and benefit from the coordination of data uses and resources to serve learning opportunities which are applied across institutions, not just self contained within them.
|
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
What we are finding is there are many practices that are interrelated and interconnected using the same data types- admissions with application assessment, study abroad with exchange of student data, corporate (experiential) learning with exchange of HR data, dual enrollment programs across institutions, early college programs across P16, adult learning programs channeling re-entry, and student transfer with claim for credit, recognition and articulation. Developing innovative and somewhat disruptive tools will help stimulate opportunities to streamline, standardize and simplify these initiatives. But, that is a huge challenge when duplication spread across them continues to have unintended consequences, costs and make them generally ineffective because they are so disconnected.
We can’t provide a holistic approach for learners unless we provide a holistic support system in our view. The nature of higher education – the practices of doing it our own way reinforced by autonomy and the overlay of academic freedom make the use of common tools and practices all the more challenging across institutions, colleges within them, departments and faculty dispersed across them. Respecting these challenges and developing tools flexible enough to bridge practices that will be accepted long term as we overcome the fears implied by central oversight to mitigate duplication, differences in semantics and data use (which would make things easier for the end user – the student) – without telling anyone what to teach, how to teach and what methods to utilize.
In the end, the focus we speak of is bringing together the higher education community to leverage technology to help bridge differences by not imposing or forcing changes in practices, but by sharing common tools supporting simple formats, process and content you can control.
Mr. David K. Moldoff
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
|