That’s not the point for me — on that front I agree with others above: get the national curriculum in place. Simplest solution, and has a whole bunch of other benefits in terms of community and sharing.

Where portfolios come into play in higher education (and perhaps high school) is student sense-making in a time of fractured “un-bundled” experience. We used to try to create coherent sequences of courses in multiple disciplines that were meant to mean something (we failed, but we tried). In a world where 50% of students that start at a university don’t finish there this clean idea of a progression plus a capstone becomes quaint at best.

What inter-institutional portfolios would do would be to allow the student to reflect on their experience across a career. And I mean portfolios very broadly here. My favorite form of “portfolio” is a blog + storage. When I say “portfolio-based assessment” I’m referring not to transfer credits, but students in a class pulling from work they’ve done in multiple places besides the class showing how they meet that standard, or reflecting on how they’ve progressed on dimension over a college career. My ideal portfolio system looks like UMWBlogs, just national — a permanent place of student presence where they can make a narrative out of their experience, in much the same way my blog has helped me integrate the experience of four jobs I’ve had since I started it.

Does that make more sense? Or less? The best model I’d argue is probably something like A Domain of One’s Own: http://umwdomains.com/

It does remind me that when I talk about the idea of a national student portfolio system supported by the government people look at me like I’m crazy, but somehow inBloom is normal.

Mebbe you’re both crazy?! I’m pretty under-read on portfolio-based accountability systems but on their face it seems like parsing all the non-standard portfolios would require doubling the size of every admissions department in the nation. What am I missing here, Mike?

One big struggle in higher education is we know meaningful experience is integrative, and we’ve bought into the idea of meaningfully tying together courses over the course of a career to prevent the fracturing of student experience. At the same time, students are increasingly itinerant, with most students receiving at least some portion of their education somewhere else. I work at a branch university, for example, where most of our students come out of the community college system, and some will try to get upper credits by taking online classes from some other institution. Additionally, terms like “3rd-year student” are increasingly ridiculous in a world where normal student experience encompasses both a three-year push to degree and a six-year slog.

The attendance patterns push us towards stricter articulatable outcomes, the pedagogy pushes us somewhere else. I think broad adoption of portfolio based assessment, where portfolios transcend individual universities, is a solution — it pushes the student to see and reflect on the integration of different parts their student career while not requiring too-tight integration of programs.

It does remind me that when I talk about the idea of a national student portfolio system supported by the government people look at me like I’m crazy, but somehow inBloom is normal. Ugh.

Dig into the Marzono bag and develop units that teach only 3-5 units. Make them problem based. Develop a few for each set of standards. Then allow students to sign up as they wish.

Sure every month or two you are changing schedules, but isn’t that better for the students anyway.

If I fail a class or miss a week and have to retake I can actually take a different problem unit that teaches the same standards so I don’t feel like I failed. Or maybe I just get a different teachers and that makes all the difference. In either case I don’t move forward until I’ve mastered the skills necessary. Almost a natural competency based education like Shawn Cornally I developing.

If my Algebraic thinking isn’t working I can slide sideways into geometry or something for a while.

What ever the thoughts, let’s stop limiting ourselves by sticking to the notion of academic years.

This brings to mind some questions.

Question #1: Does Algebra II class (for example) have to start in September and end in June? Why not have a section that starts in January or March (and perhaps spans an academic year)?

Question #2: Can a year’s curriculum be divided into independent modules, taught in different orders by different teachers? Students who come into a school mid-year could have more entry points.