ISTE Standards exercise

ISTE standards worksheet

View more documents from Juan Melendez.

What Degrees Should Mean

What should a college graduate know and be able to do? There are as many views on that as there are colleges (thousands), if not individual professors and students (many more).

The diversity of opinions about what a college education means has long been seen as a strength of American higher education. But in recent years, many employers and policy makers have argued that the lack of a common definition of what students should know and be able to do -- and a dearth of adequate methods of gauging whether they know it and can do it -- has contributed to a decline in the quality of higher education and to the awarding of more degrees, but of lesser value.

The push to set such standards at a national (and even federal) level has, in turn, led many college and faculty leaders to complain that a one-size-fits-all approach to defining student learning would result in greatly oversimplified definitions of learning.

To try to provide a shared understanding of what degrees mean -- but without, its designers insist, turning that into a government or other mandate -- the Lumina Foundation for Education is today releasing a draft of its Degree Qualifications Profile, created by four leading higher education researchers and policy experts.

Click here to see the report.

Paper explores whether and how repetition can breed competence in a business setting

The paper explores the specificity of volume-based learning in an outsourced setting. When producing a unit of output, the content of the knowledge gained can vary dramatically from one unit to the next. This suggests that while aggregate experience in learning-by-doing is generally valuable, not all prior experience has an equal impact on performance. To examine these differences we introduce a framework
to unpack the multiple dimensions of experience that exist within one unit of work.

The paper then empirically examines the customer-, domain-, and technology-specificity of learning. The empirical setting is the context of outsourced radiological services where individual doctors at an outsourcing firm complete radiological reads for hospital customers. We find that customer-, domain-, and technology-specific experience—as compared to other experience—leads to improved productivity. We discuss the implications of our results for the study of learning and experience, as well as for outsourcers and the firms that use their services.

Press here to access the paper.

Uso de la tecnología en las escuelas de PR

Oprima aquí para ver el video.

Educating Students for Success in the Global Economy

The single biggest issue on the minds of people today, and likely well into the future, is the state of the economy. How long will a recovery take? What will be needed to ensure that a future of economic vitality, innovation, and competitiveness on the global stage is possible for the United States when the current crisis subsides?

Even amid the most dismal financial circumstances in decades and a political environment in which disagreements about the way forward appear to outweigh common ground, we remain committed to the principle that in order to thrive in the future, we must prepare students today by giving them the skills necessary to navigate life and careers in an age of global connectedness and global competition.

To download the report, press here.

Educación a Distancia: Actores y Experiencias

Patricia Ávila Muñoz ofrece la versión digital del libro sobre los 20 años del Consorcio Red de Educación a Distancia (CREAD).

El libro se denomina CREAD: Educación a Distancia: Actores y Experiencias. Cuenta con la participación de reconocidos especialistas de la educación a distancia, y cada artículo nos brinda una visión panorámica de la educación a distancia en América Latina y el Caribe.

Para las instrucciones para su descarga, oprima aquí.