Certification, certification everywhere! This reputation stuff is important

I just got back from the Financial Education Association meeting in Savannah, and it seems that everyone is interested in our old friend certification.  NASBA Center for Public Trust offers an ethics certification for students, and Bloomberg is now offering the Bloomberg Aptitude Test or BAT on top of their terminal certifications.  Finally, the CFA Institute is now offering back office and CFA support workers a certification (the Claritas Program) that includes an ethics component.

Now why would all of this external certification be so important all of a sudden?  Could it be the growth in online education?

By the way, if you want to take the BAT online (it's open to anyone, worldwide), it will be proctored.  Thanks for playing!

Followup:  We offered BAT on campus for the first time on 4/17/15.  Congrats to the folks who came out to campus to take the test.

Ben Nunnally talks about the recent merger "boom" and how it happens

My friend and mentor Professor Ben Nunnally (of UNC-Charlotte) talks with a local TV personality about the mergers that are happening right now.

http://andrewsoresentwc.tumblr.com/

Letter in The Wall Street Journal today

[This is eerily similar, but not exactly the same as, my letter that appears in The Wall Street Journal, page A16, September 9, 2014]

Online University Education Grows, With Some Bumps

I wish John B. Taylor's view of online instruction could be taken as a model for moving forward in Web education, but I don't think much of what he discovered applies to the vision of online instruction held by administrators at some smaller universities ("A New Twist in Online Learning at Stanford," op-ed, Sept. 2).

Our department began offering both graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to earn finance degrees online several years ago. Now most of our students take both types of courses simultaneously to finish their programs of study in a timely fashion. Dr. Taylor mentions that he made videos of his lectures and then handed them over to "producers" to mix in other content. At our university the "producer" role is limited to fighting fires due to understaffing, and faculty are left to do things on their own (if we get the time to do them at all). We discovered too late that a good number of our students couldn't take more than one online class per semester because they were in the U.S. on student visas. All students in online courses receive the same credit as traditional students, with the result being that the reputations of both modalities are commingled in the minds of students, employers, alumni, faculty and administrators. In our experience it seems that none of those constituencies take online course work as seriously as traditional instruction.

Finally, our business school went through accreditation review in 2013 and the online courses created the biggest issue for us.

Timothy B. Michael, Ph.D.

University of Houston - Clear Lake

[end quote]


Boy howdy the phone has been busy today.

I've received some questions from folks today asking why I didn't mention proctoring in my letter.  Well, I DID mention proctoring, but it was edited out.  So I've taken the opportunity to mention the fact that we weren't allowed to proctor in the online comments section.  I also mentioned the class size issue in a separate comment.  For those of you with subscriptions, I recommend reading the comments and/or adding your own perspective.