This morning I was thinking about the single significant problem with milestone based education. The problem is that milestone based education allows students to work at their own pace and to do things in the order they want to. This is great for effective learning, but in the work place, it works very differently. Now, no one is going to convince me that the current education system is an accurate analog to the work place. Its scheduling system seems to be a lot closer though. (In fact, the workplace is more harsh: Most bosses will not accept late work, and one major mistake can result in being fired.) I can see that people might argue that traditional classroom learning will teach scheduling and responsibility better because of this. That is a lie! Formal classroom learning teaches students to prioritize their time, deciding which classes they should work harder on and which ones they can either afford poor grades in or retake. They also teach that you can just retake hard classes, with a load of easy classes to compensate. This is not any more like the work place than milestone based education, and it certainly does not teach students good time management skills.
So, here is the problem with either approach: In many industries (especially the highest paying ones, like engineering) tasks are handed out on short notice, with short deadlines, and little information. These are typically small tasks that are expected to take from a day to a week. The first problem is prioritization. How much are your current tasks worth, and how are you going to decide how to allocate your time between the tasks? This is exactly as far as classroom learning goes. The second part is, how are you going to get the new task done on time? Now, this is not taught by modern classroom learning, though some students force themselves to learn it. Most students, however, prioritize time over quality, because they can handle getting a B or even a C. In the work place, B level work may be acceptable (you won't be getting the big promotion though), but C level work is not usually acceptable. Milestone based education takes care of this problem. Instead of grading with letter grades, where knowing a measly 70% of the material is acceptable (most majors seem to require C- or better for major related classes), milestones grade pass or fail. The bar can be set at 90%, and because students can try again, all students can try as many times as necessary until they prove proficiency, without the high risk of classroom learning (instead of wasting an entire semester retaking the class, they can spend a week studying the part they missed). This teaches students that low quality work is not acceptable, instead of teaching that meeting deadlines is paramount even if the quality is horrible.
So, the problem is, how do we teach compliance (with deadlines and such) without undermining quality? We could use the oriental approach. In Japan, a C grade is equivalent to our A. To get better than a C, students have to go beyond what is taught. There are a few schools in the U.S. that use this system, but ultimately, it harms the students. Most scholarships are based on average grade. If I was getting a B average at one of these schools, I would be less eligible for scholarships than someone getting an A at another school (an A that is equivalent to a C at my school). This would have to be a global change of all schools in the U.S., and good luck getting even a small portion of U.S. schools to change their grading system. Ironically, a milestone based system can handle this problem quite gracefully.
A milestone based system allows students to study at their own pace. It also allows them to choose when they do milestone evaluations. Each milestone evaluation should be a fairly small assignment, designed to test the student's proficiency in one part of a subject. One milestone for basic math might be addition of one digit numbers. Another might be addition of multi-digit numbers. A milestone for English might be identification of simple word types, where a student would identify if a word is a noun, verb, or adjective. Another might be identifying tense of phrases. The catch is, if this is only as far as educators can see, they will miss one of the most important parts of milestone based education. Milestone tests should be designed to test a small element of the subject, but they do not have to be designed to be short. The smallness of a milestone test should reflect the element it is testing. If a milestone test is testing a student's ability to write an article in a journalism workplace setting, it should be designed to take several hours. Imagine the situation where a writer for a popular news outlet is asked to write an article about some breaking news. The assignment is given at 5 in the evening, it is required to be two pages (on normal paper, single spaced), and it must be done by midnight, so it is ready for the next morning's news. This is a fairly small assignment in the news world. This is not an assignment that is scheduled a month before it is due. It is given several hours before it is due. This is common in the work place. How can we teach students proficiency in this skill? A similar problem related to my major (computer science) is where the boss gives a small assignment that is expected to be finished in a week. Right, is that really small? Yes, in the work place, especially for computer science, a large assignment is one that takes 40 hours a week for at least three people and still takes over a year to complete. Small assignments are ones that take a few months or less, at 40 hours a week, for one person. Similarly, work place assignments are never scheduled so far in advance that it does not take significant work to get them finished on time.
The trick is recognizing the flexibility of milestone based education. While most milestone evaluations will take no more than a few hours, this is not a solid requirement. If a small assignment in journalism is a two page article on breaking news with only 6 hours notice, then this is reasonable for a milestone evaluation. Similarly, if writing a six page proposal for using a new technology in one week is a small assignment in industry for computer science, it is reasonable for a milestone evaluation. Now, the problem is that these assignments do not come when the employee requests them. They come when they are necessary. They also come when the student has had significant training in the field. Giving serious real life assignments in school in not appropriate when the students do not have significant training. In fact, in traditional education, they do not typically come at all until the student has graduated and found a job. This is something that cannot realistically be taught in a classroom setting, because no teacher can assume that students have the time to complete real work place assignments in the same time expected in the work place. The typical college student spends 60 to 80 hours a week on course work, and this is often lower than acceptable quality work for the work place. Assigning an activity that is as intense as a real work place assignment would be unethical. With a milestone based system, however, the student is not penalized for changing priorities on the fly. This means that a student can do a very intense evaluation, and put off study until the higher priority assignment is finished.
Here is how I suggest this be done: First, workplace simulation milestone evaluations should require that most of the major milestones for that evaluation be completed. So, the journalism one above should require that all English milestones for the major are complete, as well as most of the journalism reporting milestones. Second, the student should be able to schedule a range of time to do the evaluation but should not be able to schedule an exact time. Again, in the work place, the employee does not choose when a project will be assigned. So, the journalism assignment that is given only 6 or 8 hours to complete should be scheduled for a period of two weeks or more. Sometime during this period, a professor should contact the student, notifying them of the exact assignment and the deadline. On the side of the professor, it might look like this: The professor is notified when the student registers for the evaluation. The professor decides when the assignment will be given (this should be unpredictable). The timing should be realistic to what happens in industry. As the time approaches, the professor does a little research to find an appropriate event for the student to report on. When the time comes, the professor contacts the student via an appropriate medium (for this, probably email; some industries might assign something at unusual times, in which case, an employee might be sleeping, so phone would be more appropriate; think about med students). The student is given the topic to report on as well as the deadline. If the student misses the deadline, the evaluation is a failure, and it must be repeated. If the student meets the deadline and the work quality is acceptable, the milestone is completed. For the computer science evaluation mentioned above, the student might be required to schedule a month for the evaluation, since it is a week long assignment. When the time for the assignment comes, the professor would email the student with a very short email (as is common in industry) asking the student to research a technology and write up a proposal for implementing it in a specific application. For instance, the student might be asked to research an automated testing system for web sites and write a proposal for implementing such a system (this is an actual assignment I was given once). The student would be given a week to do the research and finish the proposal. Note that again, the professor would be responsible for finding an appropriate technology for the student to write the proposal on.
So, it turns out that milestone based education can be used to teach things like time management, quality assurance, and quick response to assignments. In fact, it could even be used to teach good estimation skills. In computer science, it is very common for developers to underestimate cost and schedule for a project. Imagine a milestone evaluation deliberately designed to be difficult or impossible to complete in the time given. The student might be expected to notify the professor of the scheduling difficulty before a certain amount of time has elapsed in the project. This could be worked into one of the other longer milestone evaluations, randomly. Another common event in industry is for the requirements of an assignment to change partway through. An evaluation could easily simulate that, without requiring the professor to spend much extra time. It turns out that milestone based education is not just incredibly flexible for the students, but it is also extremely flexible for professors and for education in general. We can teach students things that traditional classroom methods are not capable of teaching and in fact typically teach wrong.
In engineering fields, most employers expect new graduates to take about two years of work experience to become profitable. The reason is that the students learn tons of theory, but almost no practical skills. The theory is very helpful in learning the practical skills, but it still takes about two years in the work place to become truly valuable. One reason for this is that most colleges focus on preparing students for graduate school. Graduate school does not require practical experience. The obvious problem is that new graduates often cost more money than they produce for their first two years. Is it possible to prepare students for industry and graduate school at the same time? At BYU-I, we are actually doing this. All of the computer science and electrical engineering professors have significant industry experience, so they know exactly how things work in industry and what students need to learn to be useful right off the bat. It turns out that application of knowledge really helps with understanding theory, so teaching applications in addition to theory helps the students understand theory at least as good as students from other colleges that teach theory exclusively. It is indeed possible to teach both theory and application in the same time most colleges teach only theory. For bonus points, BYU-I CS and EE graduates have a very easy time getting jobs, because they have portfolios of work done for class projects. Milestone based education can do one step better than this. Even BYU-I students have to learn what is expected in the work place. CS and EE professors frequently mention common expectations in industry, but students do not get to actually learn how to manage those expectations. Some of those can be taught to a limited degree, but with a milestone based education system, we can teach most, if not all, work place skills. Imagine how industry would view a school where the graduates came out capable of being profitable right off the bat. In fact, imagine what other schools would think of a school where graduates coming in for graduate school could produce high quality work on time, every time.
In theory, a well implemented milestone based education system can dramatically reduce the time most students require to become well educated. A well implemented milestone system will also put the burden of learning on the students, which in today's technology driven society is a very important skill for students to learn (the BYU-I CS program puts a lot of emphasis on learning to learn and even includes a mandatory senior project designed to evaluate this skill). These are two major benefits of a milestone based approach. It turns out even the apparent weaknesses of a milestone based approach are not actually weaknesses at all. While a formal classroom based system might appear to teach prioritization, it teaches incorrect prioritization for almost all professions. A milestone based system is flexible enough to allow it to teach any prioritization scheme. Not only is this not a weakness, it is a very valuable strength, because different industries expect different prioritization schemes, and a general milestone based system is flexible enough to teach the appropriate prioritization scheme for each major.
So what this comes down to is, are we trying to teach competency or compliance? The formal classroom education system used in the U.S. seems to be focusing almost entirely on compliance. The system teaches students that the most important skill is getting things done on time, not getting things done to a high degree of quality. In fact, even to get an A, it is permissible to have 7% of answers wrong. If McDonald's found this acceptable, they would have more than 1 in 15 orders incorrect. A 70% success rate (a C-) would result in more than 1 in 4 orders being incorrect. The typical idea people see when they hear of a milestone based education system is that it is totally focused on competency. The idea of a milestone based education system is indeed to focus on competency, but if we treat compliance as just another skill, we can use milestone based education to actually teach compliance. Not only that, but we can teach compliance based on what industry it is needed for. We cannot teach compliance in competency, but we can teach competency in compliance.
It is clear that classroom based learning does not teach compliance well, and by trying, it undermines the teaching of competence. Milestone based learning is a higher system of learning. Instead of trying to do the impossible, at the cost of the necessary, it puts things in the right roles and allows the teaching of skills that most educators do not even realize are skills. I believe it is possible for students to become sufficiently competent in their area of study before they graduate. I think that our schools have a moral obligation to provide education of the necessary quality to accomplish this (given what they charge). Unfortunately, the traditional formal classroom approach to learning is no longer sufficient. We need to switch to a learning model that can keep up with changing society and technology, and milestone based education seems to show more promise than any other option.
