The Journal of Competency-Based Education最新文献

APA Citation: Gallagher, S. R. (2016). The future of university credentials: New developments at the intersection of higher education and hiring. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 254 Pages.

Contemporary universities must balance themselves on a tightrope of progress. On one side of the rope, the university is faced with providing the civic mission of higher education, and on the other side of the rope, lies the practical and more contemporary mission of higher education, which focuses on job skills and competency. This balancing act, at times, seems to create a tenuous relationship between higher education and society. Institutions operate within and as agents of society, but the relationship becomes tenuous because some higher education institutions, like other institutions, become complacent and experience difficulty in their effort to change (Burke, 2013; Nodine & Johnstone, 2015). Gallagher (2016) articulates the urgency with which higher education institutions need to reexamine their credentials and make changes to regain their position in society.

In the introduction of the book, the author discussed the “credentialing ecosystem” (p. 1). This term is used to indicate that university credentials must evolve and that universities must be willing and able to change, adapt, and update their credentials to satisfy the changing professional industries around them. The introduction is dedicated to discussing how university credentials influence employment. It is evident in the text that the term credential refers to students earning a degree or some other type of educational attainment. However, the definition of the term takes on a different meaning depending on the context being discussed. For example, the term is used in a more general form when employers refer to the institution's overall credentials.

Chapter 1 offers a discussion about how higher education became a prominent attribute in the United States. In the opening paragraph of the chapter, Gallagher (2016) implicitly focuses the reader on the purpose of higher education, “Rather than focusing on educating the elite, the higher education sector was starting to become more vocational in its focus, expanding to educate the masses” (p. 23). Later in Chapter 1, the author explains the intention of the 2-year associate degree, essentially universities wanted to focus on upper-level coursework and felt that undergraduate college curricula would align better with less advanced coursework.

Chapter 1 includes the book's thesis, aligning higher education credentials to industry skills and job market demand. In order for employers to value the education, universities offer and subsequently hire their graduates; the employer wants to be assured that applicants have the credentials associated with the skills nec

The United States Department of Education will soon begin rulemaking on issues that are near and dear (or, at least, near) to the CBE community’s heart, including the credit hour and regular and substantive interaction. The process of rulemaking, as well as what can and cannot be accomplished by rulemaking, is not always clear. In this piece, I will try to shed some light on what the process of rulemaking looks like, as well as share some thoughts on the possibilities and dangers are of the upcoming rulemaking for CBE and what the CBE community can do to help shape this important endeavor.

You may have heard of negotiated rulemaking (sometimes also called “neg reg”) but what is it? Most simply, it is a way that federal agencies get public input from a variety of stakeholders who are likely to be affected by rules (aka regulations) the agencies put out. Federal agencies get input in a number of ways, including public hearings and calls for public comments, but negotiated rulemaking is a much more choreographed and elaborate process. Any federal agency can use negotiated rulemaking to get public input, but the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) is the only one of a small number of agencies required by Congress to use this form of input for certain types of regulations.

When the Department wants or needs to make regulations having to do with federal financial aid, it cannot just write a rule and implement regulations on its own. It must work with a group of stakeholders in a highly formalized process to try and come up with a rule that everyone can agree on.

The Department starts the process by first publishing a notice saying it intends to regulate in certain areas. The notice announces the hearings or meetings in which the public can weigh in on the areas under consideration. After hearing from the community, the Department will then put out another notice spelling out what it intends to regulate on and will ask for individuals representing key stakeholder groups (e.g., institutions of various types, accreditors, students) to volunteer to serve on a committee to help draft a rule. These committee members are called negotiators, since they are working together to negotiate a rule that, ideally, will represent the collective wisdom of a variety of interests. From the people nominated (the Department cannot include someone on the negotiating committee at this stage that has not been nominated), the Department puts together a group of negotiators that it believes will represent those who will be affected by the rule, hires a neutral third party to facilitate the meetings, and puts out a schedule of meetings. These meetings are open to the public, but the public may only comment at the end of each day. Once the meetings are underway, anyone can petition the negotiating committee to be added even if they were not nominated.

The process is time-consuming and labor intensive for the Department and the community. Gener

Higher education institutions are adopting competency-based education (CBE) models because they want to become more learner-centered and improve outcomes for graduates (Nodine, 2016). CBE is inherently learner-centered because it “enables personalized learning to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible. With clear and calibrated understanding of proficiency, learning can be tailored to each student's strengths, needs, and interests and enable student voice and choice in what, how, when, and where they learn” (CompetencyWorks, 2012). Although implementation of CBE can take a multitude of forms, the common theme is demonstrated learning rather than seat time.

Our institution has a long history in online adult education in the traditional time-based model and is venturing into CBE to provide flexible, learner-centered options for our student market. We, the CBE curriculum team, were tasked with managing CBE development across colleges within the institution. To define our expectations for CBE program development, we looked for resources available to help institutions get started in creating quality CBE programs, such as the Competency-Based Education Network; however, while there are various frameworks and standards published, they do not include detailed examples or blueprints for implementing those standards in practice. Even if a detailed blueprint did exist, no one model or framework is going to perfectly fit every institution's needs. Therefore, we realized the need to research various potential applications of CBE and our unique student market to effectively customize a quality, learner-centered, competency-based learning experience for our students.

Viewing students as customers who deserve and demand a quality learning experience and evidence to show employers that they have developed valuable skills to a level of competence upon graduation, we applied service design principles to the design and development of a CBE initiative. Service design is a methodology for creating user-centered services that takes into account the customer experience holistically, ensuring that all aspects of a service work together as one to give the customer the best possible experience (Pang, 2009). Specifically, designers systematically manage and intentionally plan the user experience by looking at all service elements that deliver the experience as part of one system (Pullman & Gross, 2004). When designing a service experience, designers must identify and make decisions about all parts of the service. The challenge is making sure that the customer experience is intentionally designed for the target customer market (Goldstein, Johnston, Duffy, & Rao, 2002). In our institution, service design was leveraged to develop CBE policies, operational processes, IT requirements, and curriculum. However, the focus of this article will