Resources

Click Here for Book Review As interest in competency-based education (CBE) continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the need for a practical resource to guide development of high-quality CBE programs led the authors to write this book. Until now, there has been no how-to manual that captures in one place a big picture view of CBE along with the down-to-earth means for building a CBE program. A variety of pressures are driving the growth in CBE, including the need for alternatives to the current model of higher education (with its dismal completion rates); the potential to better manage the iron triangle of costs, access, and quality; the need for graduates to be better prepared for the workforce; and the demands of adult learners for programs with the flexible time and personalized learning that CBE offers. Designed to help institutional leaders become more competent in designing, building, and scaling high-quality competency-based education (CBE) programs, this book provides context, guidelines, and process. The process is based on ten design elements that emerged from research funded by the Gates Foundation, and sponsored by AAC&U, ACE, EDUCAUSE, and the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), with thought partners CAEL and Quality Matters. In short, the book will serve administrators, higher education leaders, faculty, staff, and others who have an interest in CBE by: • Giving context to enable the audience to discover the importance of each design element and to help frame the CBE program (the “why”); • Providing models, checklists, and considerations to determine the “what” component for each design element; • Sharing outlines and templates for the design elements to enable institutions to build quality, relevant, and rigorous CBE programs (the “how”). (From the Publisher)

Click Here for Book Review As more postsecondary faculty become engaged in designing online learning environments, research conducted on distance education program quality becomes increasingly important. Measurements in Distance Education is a concise, well-organized guide to some of the many instruments, scales, and methods that have been created to assess distance education environments, learners, and teachers. Entries are organized according to the qualities these measures attempt to gauge—such as engagement and information retention—and provide summaries of each instrument, usage information, the history of its development, and validation, including any reported psychometric properties. Offering more than 50 different surveys, tests, and other metrics, this book is an essential reference for anyone interested in understanding distance education assessment. (From the Publisher)

The second edition of Effective Grading—the book that has become a classic in the field—provides a proven hands-on guide for evaluating student work and offers an in-depth examination of the link between teaching and grading. Authors Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson explain that grades are not isolated artifacts but part of a process that, when integrated with course objectives, provides rich information about student learning, as well as being a tool for learning itself. The authors show how the grading process can be used for broader assessment objectives, such as curriculum and institutional assessment.