The Journal of Competency-Based Education最新文献

The California Community Colleges (CCC) system has adopted an equity-imperative approach to systemic reforms. As part of this effort, and to meet the state's workforce demands of the future, the system has focused on better serving the needs of adult learners, those between the ages of 25 and 64 with some college but no degree. The current impact of COVID-19 has exacerbated the inequitable learning experiences of minoritized students and has forced the system to reimagine teaching and learning, with urgency. With a heightened focus on access, persistence, and the success of CCC students, direct assessment competency-based education (CBE) through self-paced learning, high-touch and high-tech student support is a clear next step in the evolution of teaching and learning to meet the needs of adult learners. This paper discusses the impetus for such innovation and the CCC system's effort to add direct assessment CBE to its educational offerings.

Individuals need the shortest path to opportunity and employers require the shortest path to a skilled diverse workforce. To solve for this, Western Governors University (WGU) has created a skills-based architecture to map our competencies and credentials to high-demand knowledge, and technical skills as well as powerful, enduring, employability skills like critical thinking, social-emotional intelligence, creativity, and the ability to work with diverse collaborators. At WGU, these high-demand industry-relevant skills are mapped into educational experiences and credentials to better support the upskilling and reskilling needs required for our dramatically altered job market. WGU also intends to surface these skills and competency achievements to employers, thereby facilitating a more efficient and effective match of talent to opportunity. This skills-based architecture enables WGU to create new in-demand program offerings, better supporting underserved populations through new pathways and onramps to education while the alignment to skills ensures pathways to careers and a strong return on investment for students.

Minority students, particularly those of the Black and Latinx communities, face daunting challenges—confronted with the recent pandemic, ongoing inequality, and increased financial uncertainty due to job loss and rising unemployment. With recent shifts to skill-based learning and remaining "work-ready," competency-based education (CBE) has never been more critical. CBE is outcome-focused, student-centered, and integrates instruction focusing on students mastering prerequisite content and skills to advance. However, many "in-person" programs primarily structure delivery around lecture-based delivery, often focus on the quantity of work versus behavioral outcomes, and fail to recognize the synergy of innovative delivery mechanisms. In a well-designed online program/course, faculty can anchor course objectives to competencies, implement innovative assessments, leverage components of Connectivism, and utilize just-in-time learning to help their students excel. This writing focuses on best practices for implementing components of Connectivism and just-in-time learning for programs/courses shifting to online delivery.

COVID-19 has accelerated changes that were already underway in the American economy, such as the increasing displacement of workers by automation, the exponential evolution of industries due to technical advancements (the Fourth Industrial Revolution), and a widening skills gap and attainment deficit in the American workforce. As a result, adult workers and their employers will increasingly demand efficient, reputable, and customizable pathways to quickly reskill and upskill. This paper will use the UW Flexible Option as a case study for how traditional universities can build competency-based programs to help adults rapidly meet changing workforce needs. The UW Flexible Option's design is an exemplar of wrap-around support services; a flexible academic calendar; integrated and efficient curriculum design; effective assessment of competence against articulated learning outcomes; project-based learning tied to workplace competencies; and tuition policies and financial aid delivery tailored to adult learners. The design will be explored through a case study of one of our programs, the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Massive economic change will soon displace workers on a scale not yet seen, and higher education has a responsibility to ensure those individuals get back into the workforce with the appropriate skills. Institutions of higher education will need to innovate to rise to the occasion, and competency-based education is one such pathway.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the emergent body of research that addresses the changing landscape of education transitioning from brick and mortar to online/remote learning. A review of related literature for this paper includes an early perspective of online education, emergent trends, methods used to support educators and learners and a summary of best practices and opportunities for educators. Transitioning courses from on-ground to online education requires a student-centered approach, a clear understanding of the objectives, and a plan to address each of the learning goals. Remote learning does not equate to a less rigorous learning experience, instead the online delivery will provide opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and will require students to complete assignments and projects to demonstrate comprehension and mastery of the subject matter. Educators, administrators, institutional leaders may find insights into the merits of employing best practices in online education.

Competency-Based Education (CBE) programs have developed differently within higher education and medical education systems, yet both systems face challenges when bridging the gap between theory and practice. Both medicine and higher education face the challenge of adapting CBE programs for learners who begin the program with different configurations of knowledge and skillsets and learn at different rates. Additional challenges include, but are not limited to standard setting, time variability within programs for student learning, defining competencies, and training faculty to develop and assess CBE programs. This article argues there is much higher education programs can learn about defining competencies, assessing performance, and curriculum design by understanding how CBE is implemented in medical education. We also provide an overview of how CBE in medical education (CBE-ME) has evolved compared to CBE in higher education (CBE-HE), including examples of how medical education has addressed defining competency issues, assessing competence, and standard setting.

This paper details a systematic process that links industry and competency-based institutions' ability to create a more diverse talent pipeline while connecting learners to high-demand jobs. To remain competitive, competency-based institutions must closely align with industry and the government to keep their content up to date and relevant to today's job market. Paramount to this approach will be institutions' ability to assess incoming students' aptitudes before choosing educational pathways for which they may have natural skills but may be unaware of those career options. Case study data from a national leader in aptitude-based learner guidance will show that when institutions apply a data-driven approach to developing the workforce, women and ethnic minorities choose paths that match their strengths while socializing them into more non-traditional roles. A value chain is proposed that aligns industry-recognized credentials with competency-based criteria while implementing flexible assessment libraries to validate those skills. With the immense human capital challenge facing our economic recovery, applying a clear and aligned process of recruiting a broad diversity of students is critical for success. The result is a structure of actionable data that learners can use to explore career options and review personalized matches while providing competency-based institutions actionable data to recruit, advise, and plan for secondary pathways, college programs, internships, and careers.

Michelle Weise's new book is a gift you should give your professional self! The book tackles the need for change in postsecondary education by suggesting that the current education system is unprepared for a 100-year long work life with ongoing needs for upskilling. Long Life Learning is also a call to action for the Competency-Based Education (CBE) community with Weise's insightful recommendations for a new learning ecosystem in which CBE is part of the solution.

Formerly with Strada Education Network as its Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Vice President of Workforce Strategies, Michelle also brings expertise from her role as a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christiansen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Her book, Long Life Learning, consolidates her extensive research and innovation background into an impressive review of workforce realities and an open invitation to consider the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Long Life Learning is organized into two sections. The first section, From a Rigged System, sets out the research evidence for a 100-year work life and underscores the inadequacies of the current postsecondary education system in the United States. The second section, To a New Learning Ecosystem, unravels the complexities revealed in the first section to offer a clear and convincing roadmap for needed reforms, innovations, and collaborations.

In chapter 1, A 100-Year Work Life, Weise points out that 2, 4, or 6 years of front-loaded college will be woefully inadequate for the learning needs of future working adults with careers lasting more than 60 years and involving as many as twelve job changes. She highlights evidence that today's learning resources and funding models are geared to students between the ages of 18 and 24, despite that commitment approximately 70% of the high school graduates who enter college do not persist to a degree. Furthermore, of those who persist many are underemployed at graduation and 75% are underemployed 10 years later. Given the workforce reality that the top jobs sought after in 2014 did not even exist in 2009, the future calls for flexible upskilling and reskilling in a learn, earn, learn, earn cycle that is unlike standard higher education practice today.

Chapter 2, The Theories Behind the End of College, examines the growing issues about escalating costs, the rising number of Institutions of Higher Education, and the decreasing number of births in the United States. Fewer young people entering college and increasingly higher costs beg the need for disruption and innovation in the standard model of postsecondary education. Weiss sets the stage for a new system that is affordable, accessible, and structured in ways that facilitate portability and value to an employer.

Chapter 3, The Future of Work, The Future of Us, anchors Weise's arguments about the need for higher education change with a deeper look at worker reality, care

As employers update their hiring practices, such as project-based and competency-based hiring, community colleges must rethink their career and technical program content and facilitation. Community colleges are public 2-year institutions of higher learning conferring associate degrees, certificates, and industry-related credentials. Florida is an example where community colleges were rebranded as state colleges and issue bachelor's degrees while continuing to facilitate a community colleges' mission of access and completion.

Community colleges are on the front line in preparing a competent workforce with the knowledge that can transcend various domains. As employers look past grades and demand proficiency, career and technical education must comply by offering students an integrated, robust, and holistic curriculum that focuses on educating students in mass quantities, but one that offers them a framework for individual cognitive ability and critical thinking (Hirsch, 2019). Employers indicated that learning pathways that neglect to focus on the students' ability to think critically are irrelevant in the industry.

To maintain a contemporary teaching and learning, community colleges must advocate for change in that they must be willing to challenge the state regardless of the state's oversight of these institutions. Educational institutions that resort to the entrenchment of pathway dependency will be left behind as stakeholders seek more contemporary and flexible educational options.

Learning pathways are designed to align advisement and program selection in a more effective way to encourage completion by broadly structuring programs so that students can explore disciplines before choosing a focused discipline of study (Van Noy et al., 2016). Pathway development began in earnest several years ago, and many community colleges did what they always do, and continue to, divide students into groups: academic versus career and technical. Indeed, the function of the institution is to educate. All education is academic at heart, even as it may impart physical or technical skills, yet for most students, ideal education results in employment. However, many community colleges tend to force students into a divide that harms the stakeholders. Students should not be forced into choosing an academic pathway or a career and technical pathway because this choice restricts their ability to learn by suppressing learning opportunities. Blended pathways allow students to experience education in a variety of ways including work-based learning, project-based learning, and competency-based learning (Moskal et al., 2013). Flexible pathways provide students with greater mobility between programs and institutions, a greater emphasis on prior learning and work-based experience (Duarte et al., 2018). Blended and flexible pathways are more efficient as these models offer students the abilit