College Credit for Life Experience: 2 Groups Offer Assessment Services

Add one more thing to the list of tasks that colleges can outsource.

This time, it’s assessing “experiential learning"—that is, the skills students have gained in the workplace and other life trials—and determining how many credit hours should be awarded for that learning. Two fledgling organizations are game.

The idea of handing such decisions to outsiders might make some faculty members wince. But the services’ creators say that their networks of portfolio evaluators will establish national norms that will make experiential-learning assessment more clear-cut, rigorous, and credible. And as the concept gains legitimacy, they say, it could help hundreds of thousands of people complete college.

“We’re taking baby steps with our first 50 or 60 students,” says Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. “As this comes to scale, I hope that it will have an enormous impact.” Ms. Tate’s organization, known as CAEL, is the driving force behind Learning Counts, the larger of the two projects.

The second portal, which went online only two weeks ago, is KNEXT, a for-profit corporate sibling of Kaplan University. “This is absolutely the right thing to do for adult students,” says KNEXT’s vice president, Brian Oullette. “College-level learning is college-level learning, regardless of where it’s acquired. Adult students deserve to have that learning recognized and transcripted and to have it count toward a college degree.”

The two services have roughly the same design. Both of them primarily focus on adult workers who earned a significant number of college credits years ago but who, for whatever reason, never finished a degree.

Each service offers interested students a free telephone-advising session to determine whether their workplace learning might warrant course credit. Students who pass that threshold are invited to sign up for an online course that will teach them to prepare portfolios that reflect their experiential learning. (Each subject area for which the student wants credit—say, computer science or management or communications—gets a separate portfolio.) Those portfolios are then submitted to an evaluator from a national panel of subject-matter experts, who deems the portfolio worthy (or not) of course credit.

More than 80 colleges have signed up as Learning Counts pilot institutions since the service officially opened its doors in January. Those pilot colleges have pledged to accept the credit recommendations of the national evaluators, and they have agreed to award students three credit hours for successfully completing the portfolio-creation course itself.

KNEXT, meanwhile, has only a handful of participating colleges at this early date. Beyond Kaplan itself, only Grantham University and the New England College of Business and Finance have signed articulation agreements. Mr. Oullette says the project is aggressively seeking more partners.

In both systems, students are free to submit their completed portfolios to nonparticipating colleges—but in such cases there is no guarantee that any course credit will be awarded.

Show, Don’t Tell

One of the Learning Counts pilot institutions is Saint Leo University, in Florida. That institution had a longstanding program for awarding credit for experiential learning. But its president, Arthur F. Kirk Jr., says the new national system should be much more efficient and transparent.

“Evaluating portfolios is labor-intensive and time-consuming,” Mr. Kirk says. “Part of our challenge had been that students were receiving ad hoc training in creating their portfolios, and so were the faculty evaluators. Having a more efficient external system just made all the sense in the world to me.”

Clint VanWinkle, a senior at Saint Leo, is a student in the first cohort of Learning Counts. He fits the classic profile for these new programs: He completed more than 60 hours of college coursework two decades ago, then left to pursue a career in information technology. He decided to finally complete a bachelor’s degree in computer science, he says, because more employers seem to be demanding it.

But he did not want to retake courses whose content he had already mastered. So this spring, he signed up for the Learning Counts course and created a 38-page portfolio that attempts to express his mastery of networking and database architecture. If the portfolio is approved, he might be awarded as many as six computer-science credits by Saint Leo. (He submitted the portfolio two weeks ago and expects to hear the verdict within days from now.)

The portfolio process, Mr. VanWinkle says, was as challenging as any other academic experience he had this year. He was not permitted simply to assert that he had learned certain skills. “I had to describe specific work projects that matched each of the learning objectives on the syllabi of these courses,” he says.

Merging Past and Present

Will these new portals gain national stature? Much depends, of course, on the quality of the portfolio-review process. Both systems have pledged to uphold CAEL’s list of 10 standards for the assessment of experiential learning.

Asked whether the portfolio evaluators might be biased toward approval, knowing that students have spent significant time and money on the process, Mr. Oullette says, “I don’t think there will be any tendency here to award credit erroneously. It’s all done blindly, which should negate any personal pleas or passions.”

Though the new systems have broadly parallel structures, there are also substantial differences. One is the price structure: The Learning Counts course costs $500, plus $250 for each portfolio that a student wants evaluated. KNEXT’s service is an all-inclusive $999. So students like Mr. VanWinkle, who wanted to submit only one subject-area portfolio, will face lower costs at Learning Counts. (For additional fees, KNEXT also offers a series of optional noncredit courses on topics such as college-level writing and technology.)

Learning Counts also has a much broader network of institutions and evaluators, at least at this stage. Mr. Oullette says that more than 90 percent of KNEXT’s evaluators are Kaplan University faculty members. (Kaplan itself has since 2009 maintained its own portfolio-review system, which more than 600 students have completed. The “testimonials” on the KNEXT Web site come from students who have been through the Kaplan system.)

Despite the deep ties with Kaplan, Mr. Oullette says that KNEXT does not exist solely as a means of recruiting new Kaplan students. “Our goal is to find as many academic partners as we can,” he says. “Our goal is to create an independent counseling and advising system that can serve a broad range of adult learners.”

Ms. Tate, of CAEL, says that she and her colleagues are watching KNEXT’s emergence with interest. “They’ve got deep pockets, so they might be able to catch up with us,” she says.

At the same time, she says she is confident that her project, which is formally affiliated with the College Board and the American Council on Education, has momentum. “We’re actively pursuing public and private nonprofit partners,” she says. “We’re going out and making presentations to two-year and four-year institutions, and to state higher-education offices, and we’re having a lot of success.”

The Learning Counts and Knext Portals: a Rough Guide

Two new online services assess credit for skills gained on the job. Both promise to add national standards to a process that colleges have sometimes done on an ad-hoc basis.