One of higher education’s elder statesmen could see a shake-up coming.
An odd bit of administrative protocol, the credit hour, had outlived its usefulness, he thought. It forced students to bide their time for weeks, months, semesters — even if they had already mastered the material.
They should be free to move through college by demonstrating their achievement, he wrote, instead of deferring to time spent in class. A new day was dawning, wrote Walter A. Jessup, who was the leader of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — the group responsible for creating the credit hour in the first place.
"American higher education," he predicted, "appears to be well on its way to another stage of development."
That was 1937.
American higher education still hasn’t gotten there.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/How-a-40-Year-Old-Idea-Became/233976