Sasha Thackaberry's List: Competency-Based Education

• Growing numbers of students are enrolling in noninstitutional programs. For example, roughly 16,000 students are expected to graduate from boot camps this year, Fast Company reported, which is up from 6,740 last year.
• As a result, the department has been mulling an “experimental sites” project that would open up federal aid to a limited group of academic programs that colleges and nontraditional providers would offer jointly.
• As Inside Higher Ed reported in April, the department would waive certain rules for federal aid eligibility under the experiment, such as the regulation that fewer than 50 percent of academic programs can be outsourced to nonaccredited, noninstitutional providers.
• To participate in the project, an accredited college and its partner provider -- perhaps a boot camp like General Assembly or an online course provider such as Udacity -- would need to apply to the department and be accepted as an experimental site. Qualifying programs would include the imprimatur of some third-party, such as an accreditor, that does quality assurance based on minimum thresholds the department would establish.

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• Largest Grant in College History to Focus on Information Technology

   

  Sinclair and two partner colleges, working in collaboration with Western Governors University, were awarded a $12 million grant from the Department of Labor today to create a revolutionary change in how information technology (IT) training is conducted. This grant is the largest in Sinclair College's history and will be focused in part on retraining displaced workers in the high-demand area of IT.
• The project has a goal of a 20% increase over current completion and employment rates. The college will take one year to develop the curriculum for the new program and will pilot test it for a year with the goal of becoming operational by 2015. The college will share information and curriculum with the grant partner colleges and will look to deliver the competency-based learning model to other academic programs.

• Some of the country’s most rigorous research universities have a new obsession: flexibility. As the institutions contemplate a more modular future, experiments with blended learning may provide an early glimpse at their plans.
• Regardless of the definition, flexibility has much in common with MIT’s plans to “modularize” education -- breaking courses down into smaller modules that can be taken on their own or shuffled and rearranged into a more personalized experience. In a preliminary report released last year, MIT toyed with the idea of “unbundling education and blurring boundaries” -- combining distance and in-person instruction to the point where students could one day spend as little as two years on campus.

• With the explosion of online learning, a disruptive innovation, there has been significant attention paid to the likely unbundling of higher education (see Michael Staton’s AEI piece and this University Ventures Fund piece, for example).

   

  We’ve written about unbundling ourselves. In every industry, the early successful products and services often have an interdependent architecture—meaning that they tend to be proprietary and bundled. The reason for this is that when a technology is immature, in order to make the products reliable or powerful enough so that they will gain traction, an entity has to wrap its hands around the whole system architecture so that it can wring out every ounce of performance.

• The new Digital Learning Research Network (dLRN) is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. LINK Lab Executive Director George Siemens will coordinate work between UT Arlington and nine additional institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Teachers College Columbia University, the Smithsonian Institution, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and others.
• Siemens said the aim of the grant is to close a gap that has existed between digital learning research and its impact on practice, as well as amplifying the breadth and depth of research being conducted. The Digital Learning Research Network will benefit universities who are making the transition to digital learning and learners from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.
• Some of the areas to be addressed by research include: competency-based learning; learning analytics; growth of higher education globally; learning at scale and Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs; personalization and adaptation; and credentialing and accreditation through digital programs.

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• Data is confirming what we already know: recruiting is an imprecise activity, and degrees don’t communicate much about a candidate’s potential and fit. Employers need to know what a student knows and can do.

   

  Something is clearly wrong when only 11% of business leaders — compared to 96% of chief academic officers — believe that graduates have the requisite skills for the workforce.
• Even the latest hoopla around massive open online courses (MOOCs) amounts to more of the same: academics designing courses that correspond with their own interests rather than the needs of the workforce, but now doing it online.
• But there is a new wave of online competency-based learning providers that has absolutely nothing to do with offering free, massive, or open courses. In fact, they’re not even building courses per se, but creating a whole new architecture of learning that has serious implications for businesses and organizations around the world.
• It’s called online competency-based education, and it’s going to revolutionize the workforce.
• Say a newly minted graduate with a degree in history realizes that in order to attain her dream job at Facebook, she needs some experience with social media marketing. Going back to school is not a desirable option, and many schools don’t even offer relevant courses in social media. Where is the affordable, accessible, targeted, and high-quality program that she needs to skill-up?
• • This is where community colleges can be so valuable!
• Broadly speaking, competency-based education identifies explicit learning outcomes when it comes to knowledge and the application of that knowledge. They include measurable learning objectives that empower students
• A small but growing number of educational institutions such as College for America (CfA), Brandman, Capella, University of Wisconsin, Northern Arizona, and Western Governors are implementing online competency-based programs.
• The key distinction is the modularization of learning. Nowhere else but in an online competency-based curriculum will you find this novel and flexible architecture. By breaking free of the constraints of the “course” as the educational unit, online competency-based providers can easily and cost-effectively stack together modules for various and emergent disciplines.
• the resulting stackable credential reveals identifiable skillsets and dispositions that mean something to an employer. As opposed to the black box of the diploma, competencies lead to a more transparent system that highlights student-learning outcomes.
• Competency-based learning flips this on its head and centers on mastery of a subject regardless of the time it takes to get there.
• Learning is fixed, and time is variable.
• These programs are already priced comparable to, or lower than, community colleges, and most offer simple subscription models so students can pay a flat rate and complete as many competencies as they wish in a set time period.
• Online competency-based education has the potential to provide learning experiences that drive down costs, accelerate degree completion, and produce a variety of convenient, customizable, and targeted programs for the emergent needs of our labor market.
• A new world of learning lies ahead. Time to pay attention.

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