By: Adrian R. Cornelius, Forum Faculty, Registrar Forum @ Tech; and University Registrar at the University of Maryland
Overview of competency education
At the Registrar Forum @ Tech, forum faculty Mary Beth Myers, Registrar at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), kicked off with a “parasail” overview of the wide variety of academic, extra-curricular, and life experiences with which today’s students “land” on the doorsteps of colleges and universities.
Students increasingly want to have their competencies and skills recognized and translated to academic credit that count toward graduation. Ranging from dual credit in high school to military experience to Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) completions to work experience to other life experiences, and many others, these “backpacks” challenge traditional records keeping services in registrar’s office operations, further accentuated by students’ looking for unique ways to complete their degrees in flexible scheduling formats. Does the push we hear for more online education ring a bell?
In this “one-size-does-not-fit-all” teaching and learning environment, one major question on college campuses is, “How might we structure certain courses and programs in time-variable competency modules so that students can progress more quickly and at their own pace, while gaining credit for the experiences that increase their success rate in today’s world?” Many believe that the answer lies in instituting competency-based education theories into academics and in the transcription of student records and credentials.
With the support of foundations such as Lumina and other higher education organizations such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Educause, the concept of competency-based education is gaining traction in post-secondary education. IUPUI, for example, was selected as one of a handful of universities to participate in a competency-based education workshop sponsored by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL).
Myers pointed out that one item of importance discussed at the CAEL workshop is that there are varying ways to recognizing the competencies of our students, and while we can do research and evaluation on what might work best for each institution, one thing we cannot do is to ignore the existence and value of competencies. According to Myers, “While no-one is advocating rushing back to our institutions, tossing out the course/credit hour model, and replacing it with a module-based format, as registrar professionals, we need to be aware and engaged on our campuses, looking for opportunities where implementing more module-based learning and assessments might be the best approach.”
Competency in action: Flexible option
Forum faculty, Scott Owczarek, University Registrar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighted two specific and major instances of competency-based education in action.
The first was the UW Flexible Option, which establishes how students could use prior learning and other experiences as options to completing competency-based education requirements, either through the completion of individual competencies, or through the association of these with their degree programs. An example in this case might be for a course to identify the competencies that make up that particular course, then establish assessment mechanisms to meet those competencies, and further identify areas of prior learning that could alternately be used to meet competency requirements.
The question of major interest to registrar professionals, however, is how we transcribe student performance in competencies. Some major considerations involve understanding our audience (i.e. who really looks at the transcript--graduate schools? employers?), and the intent and use of the data. Those are the types of questions the UW System committee is investigating, in addition to establishing definitions and standards to enable articulation. Audience, definitions, and standards are, therefore, three key aspects of competency-based education the committee will be investigating this summer.
Competency in action: Reverse transfer data exchange
The second initiative that Owczarek discussed was what he referred to as “an exciting reverse transfer data exchange initiative,” which would leverage higher education institutions’ National Student Loan Data Services (NSLDS) existing reporting partnerships with the National Student Clearinghouse. This three-phase initiative, initiated by American Association of Universities (AAU) registrars, involves the creation of an electronic infrastructure that adds data elements to schools’ current transmissions to enable data exchange and support reverse transfer programs.
This new and improved solution would allow two-year schools, for example, to not only identify other institutions to which their students had transferred or taken courses, but also enable them to access the students’ course performance data and articulate them back (reverse-transfer them) into their own degree audit systems to assess associate’s degree eligibility at their former institutions. According to Owczarek, “The possibilities are exciting and endless, and societal benefits are huge with this borderless student data exchange capability enabling the awarding of more degrees to students who have now earned them having completed their credits at other institutions.”
Through the initiative with the Clearinghouse, the records of students who have attended several institutions would be composited in a single database, and be available for access by the institutions where the students attended, and can potentially translate into major academic and life benefits to the student. Additionally, the Clearinghouse is planning on developing an electronic interface that would allow students to see a more complete educational record of their performance in post-secondary education, something they cannot currently do.
Forum participants raised a number of questions concerning the capability being developed by the Clearinghouse, such as the records ownership, transcript request and fees processing, records security and confidentiality, and associated risks of having a private national record. Attendees expect that these questions will be answered to the satisfaction of the entire higher education community prior to the operationalization of the initiative.
Trends in student records
Tom Black, forum faculty, and Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and University Registrar at Stanford University, summarized what was trending in higher education into five major themes: electronic formats, internet delivery (including mobile), evidence-based results, integrative learning, and outcomes. According to Black, “Outcomes is the most exciting because it’s the articulation and formulation of explicit statements of learning.”
The student’s record today does not give the recipient any idea of what was learned, and does not represent to the students what they should have acquired (particularly since even course titles are often truncated on the transcript). Competency-based education opens up a great opportunity for records officers to “collect” even more meaningful statements of student engagements, make them more explicit, and re-engineer the transcript. This way, the learning statements would be expressed clearly and illustrated, and courses would indeed serve as more comprehensive references of the learning that has taken place. This would allow students to own their learning, as they would now be able to see, read, and absorb their learning statements. As a result, they would feel much more comfortable commanding what they have learned.
Curriculum is not easy to understand--academicians understand it because they created it. However, it very rarely expresses to the students its objective, and how it applies to the preparations the faculty wants for the students. Hence, as registrar officers engage in their institutions competency-based initiatives, we should consider collecting in an explicit manner what is being learned and returning it to the students in a meaningful, personalized, way on a comprehensive electronic transcript. This would help the students narrate their stories better, especially since each story would be different.
Black exhorted Forum participants to promote and facilitate the use of electronic platforms, such as e-portfolios, that would encourage students to illustrate their own personal learning stories, and in so doing, move themselves to self-awareness and self-actualization. According to Black, “It’s our contention that renewed confidence and self-actualization will allow the students to present themselves better to third parties. We, as registrars, can actually contribute to this in a very fundamental way, and thereby become educators ourselves.”
Drivers of competency-based education
In my Forum presentation, I shared with participants what has been commonly identified as the drivers of competency-based education. One of these is higher education itself, which is beginning to look introspectively at how to better prepare our students to compete at the highest levels for graduate school admission and for the job market, and how to enable graduates to be most successful in both arenas. Other drivers include the public call for accountability concerning the value of education, particularly as costs keep soaring; employers’ perception of a mismatch between available jobs and the skill sets of the college graduates seeking to fill them; and, graduates themselves questioning the value of their degrees compared to the money they invested in their education, understandably heightened by the fact that they might be unable to find jobs in a less than desirable economy.
These issues are signaling the need for change in the teaching learning engagement, and colleges and universities are beginning to implement competency initiatives to meet stakeholders’ expectations. As a result, competency-based education is beginning to have a disruptive impact on the curricula of schools, and on the transcripting and credentialing of students’ participation. I shared with Forum participants that in my research on this approach, Mike Reilly, Executive Director of AACRAO, pointed out that the effect goes from least disruptive (as in the case where learning outcomes are directly associated with the course and the student’s grade) to the most disruptive circumstances (in which students pursue competencies outside of the classroom, and results are never mapped back to the courses and grades). In the former approach (which is what most institutions are doing at this time), AAC&U recommendations, for example, might be used to define learning outcomes, develop assignments, create rubrics, and a traditional transcript can be used to display student outcomes. The latter category is most disruptive because, being outside of the course/credit norm, it creates issues for Title IV reporting, transfer and articulation, and credentialing. There is a middle approach on this disruptive spectrum, where students meet competencies outside of the course/grade framework, but these are mapped back to the courses. In this case, an institution might produce a competency-based transcript in addition to the conventional transcript.
Some of the ways in which institutions are beginning to represent student engagements in competencies are by awarding digital badges (which look like a Boy/Girl Scout’s badge) for successful completions of competencies, or by providing a competency report highlighting the personal skills and achievements of the student, or by creating enhanced electronic transcripts on which meaningful portions (e.g. the course title, the grade, transfer credit information) are hyperlinked to more explicit information of that particular portion. I shared with the Forum participants information provided to me by Bill Haid, University Registrar at the University of California, San Diego, illustrating how his office is positioning itself to support this innovative student records transcription approach.
Of interest to the conversation at the Forum was that several states have begun legislating competency-based education. The State of Maryland, for example, is requiring the development of four-year plans for students, the granting of credit for experiential learning (e.g. military training), lifting credit caps for resident credit, instituting state-wide transfer agreements (including reverse transfer and near completers initiatives), and offering tuition waivers for dually enrolled students.
Forum participants discussed that these types of expectations would present functional and administrative challenges to registrar personnel, as consideration needs to be made regarding coding, storing, and reporting evidence of completions in our student information and learning management systems. I discussed with attendees a foremost question concerning transfer and articulation with which registrar officers would have to grapple, which was brought to my attention by Joellen Shendy, Associate Vice Provost and Registrar at the University of Maryland University College. That question relates to whose job it will be to establish common language within these personalized records so that interpreting competency does not mean one thing to one graduate school admissions officer (or employer) and something else to another.
An important responsibility
At the conclusion of the Forum, it was agreed upon that, as an excellent conduit to our faculty, registrar officers have an opportunity to find and propose administrative solutions to the academic engagement. This is an undertaking that we can ill-afford to take lightly, as official certifications and verifications of the records rest squarely upon our shoulders.