Robert W. Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, an online, nonprofit institution, was the guest today on The Chronicle’s weekly discussion, The Brown Bag. Mr. Mendenhall answered questions about the quality of distance education and the idea of awarding degrees based on competency assessments instead of traditional measures of grades and seat time.
“The beauty of our system is that we don’t have to worry about evaluating credit for prior experience,” said Mr. Mendenhall. “If people have the required competencies, they are not required to take courses anyway just to accumulate credit hours—they simply demonstrate that they have the competencies through our assessments and they can graduate. We measure what students know and can do—we don’t care how or where they gained the competencies, as long as they can demonstrate mastery of them. That’s the advantage of measuring learning rather than time.”
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