The Importance of Learning Outcomes

Female Speaker:
Transparency is the next big thing in higher education, particularly for adults going back to school, because adults typically have work obligations, family obligations, they are participants in their community. They have limited time, but also a very clear goal of what they want to do with their degree.

Male Speaker:
Transparency does challenge the concept of whether or not I am enrolling or choosing or selecting a good school, and it should, because it takes away some of the emphasis on inputs, number of PhDs where the faculty reputations and it puts the emphasis on the learner and the outputs, which is learning.

Male Speaker:
I believe we have an ethical responsibility to our learners to be able to assure them that we are going to be able to document how well they performed. We are in a world where we need to get beyond generality, so I really liked that program or I really liked that course or it really prepared me. Those are all really important statements, but to be able to document it. In fact, here is what I learned, here is how well I performed.