Self-Designed Master's Degree

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Rich Douglas, Feb 3, 2016.

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  1. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    When I did my Union PhD, learners formed and chaired a committee of internal and external faculty, plus peer learners, and designed their degree programs from scratch. Degree programs had two components: the "taught" portion where the learner demonstrated mastery of his/her discipline, and the "Project Demonstrating Excellence," which usually (but not always) took the form of a doctoral dissertation.

    The taught portion was designed by the learner and approved by the committee in the form of a learning agreement. For each area of the discipline, the learner proposed these three elements:
    • Learning Area
    • How it would be mastered--learning methods
    • How mastery would be demonstrated

    So, for each area the learner proposed what was to be learned, how he/she was going to go about learning it, and then how he/she would demonstrate his/her learning. The committee determined (a) if the areas to be learned were comprehensive--did they cover the proposed degree concentration and specialty?--and if each area was sufficiently covered by the learning process and mastery demonstration. Otherwise, it was wide open as far as what the learner wanted to study. It was a self-designed doctorate.

    My question: does anyone know of a school that still does this at the master's level? Union doesn't; it has some very specific master's, but not a self-designed one. (Nor is the PhD like that anymore.) There are some schools, like Fielding, that dictate the first (learning areas and objectives) and the student proposes the methods and mastery. But I don't know if there is one out there that will let you do all three--design your own master's degree (with faculty guidance and approval, of course).

    Any ideas?
     
  2. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    This school offers a self-designed Master's in...Self-Design! (Building learning communities.)

    Admissions - SelfDesign Graduate Institute

    Looks like a serious effort. Not yet accredited - school states it has applied for National Accreditation in 2016 - no specific accreditor named. I'm not sure that it meets all of Dr. Rich's specs. Interesting, though.
    I believe this institute has recently awarded its first five Master's degrees.

    J.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 4, 2016
  3. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    ...Or, with much less work and study, you could try the Johann Academy of Transpersonal Phenomenology. For $25K, we'll let you design and print your own diploma! :jester:

    J.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 4, 2016
  4. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Bump. I'm hoping someone will know....
     
  5. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    Well, if I must. . . .

    Keep in mind that my knowledge of these schools is almost 30 years old (I haven’t looked at them in detail since I was looking for myself back in the late ‘80s), a few of the self-designed MA programs I looked at back then were:

    `
    Some history . . .

    These were my initial choices. I narrowed them down to Antioch, Goddard, and Vermont College of Norwich University, and actually visited all three.

    Antioch had anti-war bumper stickers on almost every car on campus – it was like they were stuck in the 60’s. Goddard had an old-fashioned dot-matrix printed computer banner hanging across their cafeteria that said, “We came out proud, and we’re not going back in the closet!” Charming, but naïve in the age of AIDS. – they were stuck in the 70’s. V.C. was the only one of the schools which actually seemed to be in the ‘80s (it was 1987 when I made my visits).

    I ruled out Goddard because I would only have one advisor, a Goddard faculty member. Bad idea – I wasn’t about to put my destiny in the hands of only one faculty member who didn’t even have a degree in my field.

    I applied to both Antioch and V.C. and was accepted by both. I ruled out Antioch because students had to do a lot of administrative paperwork in terms of paying faculty for evaluations. I favored V.C. because they had a core professor and bi-monthly one-day interdisciplinary seminars right in my home area (Philadelphia). And were part of a major university. Went with V.C. and have never regretted it.

    Another historical note: The V.C. graduate program had started at Goddard. After Goddard had financial problems, in 1981 they sold all of their low-residency programs to Norwich University, which put them into Vermont College (Norwich and V.C. had merged in 1971). Goddard agreed to not reenter the nontraditional market for three years and, sure enough, three years later they started new programs which were not nearly as good (including the one I looked at when I visited Goddard).

    Unlike Goddard’s one-advisor “revised” M.A. program, the V.C. program had a three-person faculty model: a core, second core, and “field faculty advisor” nominated by the student (similar to an adjunct in the old Union model). Other than terminology, Vermont College was very similar to the old Union Graduate School model. Since I went through that process at V.C., I was able to graduate from Union in their then-two-year minimum.

    Of course, V.C. no longer exists. Norwich sold it to Union when Union was having its problems with OBR and North Central. Union kept the best programs and trashed the rest,. And the learning model went to hell when all of Union adopted online education and began doing canned, rote programs. The V.C. campus is now the thriving Vermont College of Fine Arts.

    What Rich describes is an era that seems long gone buh-bye, when non-traditional education was highly individualized, before today’s trends in online programs (which I think are largely crap).

    Note to Rich: If you want a great piece of reading, check into The Transformation of Norwich University 1971-1981, by Peter Plympton Smith. It’s Peter’s doctoral thesis for the Ed.D. from Harvard, and copies are in the holdings at both Norwich and the Gary Library (which is now part of Union). Peter has been, among other things, the lieutenant governor of Vermont, the sole VT congressman (before Bernie Sanders defeated him), and the founder of VT Community College. A fun read, which focuses on the merger of N.U. and V.C. (1981) and the acquisition of the Goddard low-residency program (1981).
     
  6. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

  7. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I think that the Lesley program has changed too. It's only the MEd that's self-designed so the topics are limited to the realm of Education.
     
  8. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    A couple of incidental notes . . .

    Skidmore was one of the original University Without Walls programs. Their undergrad UWW closed shop in 2011 and, as Bruce notes, the MALS is about to follow suit.

    This is yet another example of the death of creative, individualized nontraditional education, making way for canned, rote online programs (although I did not see any references to online education on Skidmore’s web site).

    When I was seeking a bachelor’s degree program, I visited several schools, and Skidmore was one of them. At their on-campus information session, the beer was flowing freely (which didn’t impress me, since I’ve never been a drinker), and one of the questions I presented about the UWW was when students graduated. I remember the representative’s response word for word: “Well, you do your work, and when you think you’re ready and we think you’re ready, you graduate.” I promptly wrote off Skidmore based on the inherent bullshit in such an answer.

    Skidmore is a fairly exclusive (and very expensive) almost-in-New-England college (it’s located in Saratoga Springs, NY, which comes under the heading of mucho dinero). It’s also one of the top party schools in the country (I think I read that in a college guide written several years ago by Lisa Birnbach, who is better known as the author of the classic The Preppy Handbook. According to Wikipedia, in 2013 Skidmore was also found to be the top school in the country for marijuana use.

    Nonetheless, they were a leader in the UWW movement and individualized education in their time. After the shut down the UWW, they produced a book(let) of “reflections” written by their students and graduates, and it’s worth reading for the history of the program alone. It’s at http://www.skidmore.edu/odsp/documents/UWWReflections.pdf , and includes their history of working with the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities (now Union Institute & University).

    Combining all of this with Kizmet’s comment on Lesley, it’s one more nail in the coffin for individualized education and in favor of online merde de boeuf (as the French might say). Online programs may seem cool to today’s iPhone-addicted generation that types with its thumbs, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the UWW model I was lucky enough to catch in time for my own education.

    Think I'll make a call on my plain ol' fashioned flip phone... :veryhappy:
     
  9. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Call me Uncle Steve and tell me again about walking 20 miles to school...uphill...both ways...:phone:
     
  10. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 8, 2016

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