The student experience: How competency-based education providers serve students

June 30, 2015
  • AACRAO Connect

The rise of competency-based education (CBE) has redefined what college looks like for a growing number of students. The basic idea underlying CBE is simple: programs award credit based on demonstrated student competencies rather than on the amount of time a student has spent in a given course. Recent advances in technology, including online courses, computer adaptive education, interactive tutoring and mentoring, and the analysis of big data, have only added to CBE’s potential. But CBE models have dramatic implications for how schools serve students, and those changes can affect student success and scalability. Unfortunately, we still do not clearly understand how students actually experience education in a CBE model—that is, the day-to-day process of learning, assessment, and progression.

Some of the most prominent CBE providers have designed their programs to meet students’ needs--and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has published a study examining CBE models in comparison to the familiar phases of the traditional college experience at four-year institutions: recruiting students, starting a program, earning credits, and interacting with others.

Key points include:

  • Competency-based education (CBE) inverts the structure and choice of traditional higher education. The most clearly defined components of traditional higher education programs are much less structured in CBE programs, and the components of traditional higher education programs that are typically the most flexible and able to be personalized are often fixed in CBE programs.
  • CBE programs tend to serve students with previous professional or academic experience, which affects how the programs are structured and designed. 
  • Striking differences exist between CBE and traditional higher education programs in how students are recruited, admissions and credit transfer policies, how credits are earned, and interactions with peers and faculty.
  • The differences between CBE programs and more traditional higher education have important implications for student success and scalability. We need more information about how students experience these programs.

ïMore CBE resources

Assessment’s New Role in Degree Completion: A Registrar’s Primer on Prior Learning Assessment and Competency-Based Education. Written by AACRAO and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), this 23-page publication provides an introduction to prior learning assessment (PLA) and CBE, and explores what registrars should consider in their roles supporting institutional adoption of these assessment-focused programs and services.

Rethinking the regulatory environment of competency-based education. This paper examines current or proposed regulatory frameworks for the management of competency-based programming at the state, accreditor, and federal levels; highlights key concerns with and among these systems and notes where efforts are being made to resolve barriers; and recommends strategies for improving state, accreditor, and federal oversight of CBE programming, 

Measuring mastery: Best practices for assessment in competency-based education.This paper introduces a set of best practices for high-stakes assessment in CBE, drawing from both the educational-measurement literature and current practices in prior-learning and CBE assessment. 

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