A special featured keynote by Bob Mendenhall, President of Western Governor’s University at Learning Impact 2013
It really doesn’t matter who you talk to in the education field. Literally all agree that doing a better job of understanding competencies is the way that education needs to move. It’s about what you know and what you can do, rather than what course you took and what grade you got in that course.
Western Governors University (WGU) is the recognized leader in competency-based non-profit higher education in the U.S. We are very pleased that President Bob Mendenhall will be joining us at this year’s Learning Impact 2013 to tell the WGU story and participate in a panel on higher education leadership.
As we do with many of our keynotes at Learning Impact we have published a brief interview article with Bob.
In some respects this is sort of a “coming out” for WGU in that they have been replacing proprietary integrations (those very popular “open APIs” that every vendor likes to promote) with open standards-based integrations using 1EdTech LTI. As the article mentions, WGU has quietly replaced 20 such custom integrations with LTI over the past several years, with probably 30 or so more to go!
Which brings us to the very critical link between competency-based learning and open interoperability standards. The reason why WGU has so many different applications to integrate is because the best resources in different fields come from different providers. You might think this circumstance is unique for WGU. It is not even today, but less so in the future. That’s because your departments and faculty want to use these sort of resources – or will be wanting to – and, if they are doing so now they are probably doing it WITHOUT INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION AND SUPPORT. Sorry to get loud there, but frankly we are finding that many educational CIOs need to be woken up to both the challenges and opportunities (for better service) to departments and faculty. Well, in a nutshell, 1EdTech standards are all about enabling this – just as is happening at WGU.
There is more information on how to join this open digital innovation revolution, including two special programs to aid higher ed involvement/adoption (called THESIS) and K-12 involvement/adoption (called I3LC).
