Forging new pathways of research and innovation in open and distance learning

The Carnegie unit
Credit, Trust and Open Education
Katherine Sutherland
In an effort to allow for electives and greater educational flexibility, in the 19 th century
Harvard undertook a curricular reform project.
The Carnegie Unit was introduced in late 19 th c as measure of high school progress and
completion. Importantly, it is based on student hours of study—120 hours of class time over a
year.
The collegiate/ academic credit was introduced in 1869 by Charles W. Eliot at Harvard with
the emergence of elective courses, which could not be assessed through a single
comprehensive exam system. These credits were also based on contact hours. Though the
simplicity of quality assurance through the public comprehensive exam was lost, it is critical
to note that this was sacrificed in favour of more open, flexible educational programs.
The research question here is to explore historically how trust and quality assurance were reestablished
in the wake of curricular reform.
This links to the emergence of accreditation practices and organizations. Is an accreditation
system inevitable in the wake of curricular reform?
The Monetization of Academic credit
Perhaps the most complicated consequence of the adoption of the modern, disembodied,
abstract notion of academic credit was the almost immediate reduction of academic credit to a
curricular accounting system, in which credits are quickly monetized. Credit hours are
commonly used as the basis for calculating tuition fees, student loans, and faculty salaries and
workloads.
In this context, “The credit system makes the university a banking system,” as John Harris
puts it (2002; p.4).
Can academic credit be decoupled from academic financial systems?
The “Inflation” of Academic credit
As with any “currency,” inflation is a concern. In fact, many are worried that credit inflation
has already occurred.
In Ivory Tower Blues, Coté and Allahar argue that “…students have come to universities with
higher expectations about the grades to which they feel entitled. This situation has intensified
in direct proportion to the increase in enrolments in Canadian universities, as the competition
to gain entrance increases. As more and more students with inflated grades, but lower levels of
academic interest and ability, have entered Canadian universities year after year, many
professors have given in by watering down their courses and inflating grades” (2007; p.19).
320 Reaching from the roots – 9 th EDEN Research Workshop Proceedings, 2016, Oldenburg
ISBN 978-615-5511-12-7