The day of your father’s degree is coming to an end.

Proof of Mastery as a Replacement for Testing: The exercise and assessment system of the Khan Academy requires that a student demonstrate mastery of every concept prior to moving on to the next item. The requirement of such a level of demonstrated understanding combined with a periodic recheck to insure retention of the skill renders end of course testing concepts irrelevant. Additionally, the Khan system is based on immediate formative feedback (feedback that allows the student to immediately learn from their mistakes) rather than the individually useless summary feedback (students are given a score but have no opportunity to understand what questions they missed) of todays high stakes testing.

Life long: K to Grey: Some estimates of the half life of some engineering degrees is as low as five years. Increasingly it will be the case that a historical degree will be of far less importance than current skills and demonstrated accomplishments. If indeed most people will have several careers during their lifetime then it will be necessary to have a system that  tracks and measures an individuals abilities for their entire lives.

Multi dimensional: Content, Skills, Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Physical abilities, Social Networks, Whuffie: Besides knowing stuff it will be critical for an individual to be skilled at getting things done with other people who are spread around the world with different cultures.

Dynamic: What you did once upon a time is not as relevant as what you did yesterday and can do today and how you are preparing for tomorrow.