For more than 100 years, high schools and colleges have relied on the same stalwart tool to measure teaching and learning: the clock. That’s because earning credit toward a diploma or degree typically requires students to spend a minimum number of hours receiving instruction in the classroom.
Now, the institution that developed the time-based standard more than a century ago that is used throughout education is calling for the creation of a different way to quantify academic progress. This week, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — the folks who brought us the Carnegie Unit, the basic segment of time measurement in many degree programs, in 1906 — announced its intentions to change that currency of learning from “seat time” to “skills.”
