This is not a new thing, although NMSU press release seems to say so.
“Liberal studies” have been around for a long time. Previously mentioned how “New College” at the University of Hawaii in 1970 offered a student directed, and multidisciplinary approach to higher ed. Your correspondent received a “Liberal Studies” degree from UH Hilo in 1982, or so, and it was very much a DIY degree.
This NMSU effort of note here because when one gives the tools of education to students themselves, as we are doing online and in the cloud today, we are enabling and almost requiring a DIY approach to learning…. where the student assembles from a smorgasbord of learning choices some coherent learning meal that fits them and their needs.
An obvious challenge for ed institutions is how to then certify or credit such boundary destroying learning activities…the kludge NMSU is announcing here is one such way…but ultimately DIY learning and degrees defies present modes of accreditation, and pushes personal packets of qualification to the fore. What’s in your cloud based accumulation of learning activities?
That’s what employers will want to know in the future, and it may not include anything from today’s institutions. We’ve had this discussion before as to what’s going to happen to accreditation and gate keeping, when learning isn’t the controlled province of huge institutions, as it mostly still is today. Third party qualifiers will arise, sort of like “agents” represent “clients” in some fields today. Perhaps. Or something we haven’t yet seen.