Applying service design in competency-based curriculum development

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 be on how we leveraged service design specifically to develop curriculum.

As CBE was a completely new endeavor for our institution, and we had no concrete examples of successfully implemented CBE programs to follow, we viewed ourselves as a start-up team who had the shared goal of innovating a holistic curriculum development model to truly serve the needs of our students/customers. From this perspective, we considered curriculum design and development as services that we as a curriculum development team provide to adult learners who have varying needs and levels of experience. We applied aspects of Stickdorn and Schneider's (2011) five principles of service design to the creation of our curriculum development model.

The five principles of service design are as follows:

With the student at the core of the service design, we had to view the student learning experience as many interrelated parts of a system. In terms of service design, an experience can be defined as “a period of time when the customers interact with the different elements of a context created by the service provider” (Gupta & Vajic, 2000). Table 1 details what the five principles of service design might look like when applied in a curriculum development model.

To create our curriculum development model, we first needed to define the target student market. The university marketing group conducted user experience surveys from which they built personas for our university's target student segments. The personas they developed described working adults who are seeking career advancement. Some are motivated to provide for their families and others to finish a degree they had already started. Flexibility and time to complete the degree are important considerations for these student segments of our university.

We also had personas and journey maps created specifically for students who would be interested in enrolling in a competency-based program. The personas showed that personalized learning and the ability to use existing knowledge and experience to move quickly through courses were of high importance to these students. The journey maps detailed a student's journey through a CBE program from the decision to enroll to graduation, and they included all experiences, people, technology, and processes involved.

Using the personas and journey maps, we were able to place the specific student needs and motivations at the center of our development model and identify the many “touch points” with various stakeholders within the system of the student experience that are affected by curriculum design and development. In defining these touch points, we created a holistic curriculum development model that aligned with the principles of service design as they relate to the student learning experience as a service. Our model accounted for the many stakeholders (designers, subject-matter experts, faculty, etc.) and processes (curriculum, instruction, technology, training, orientation, etc.) involved in the system of the student learning experience. Our development model consists of five interrelated elements which we describe in the Curriculum Development Model section.

Finally, after using our curriculum development model to create prototype courses, we conducted a series of pilots to test our model and make improvements as needed. See the Student Input from Pilot section for examples and insights from the pilots.

Through discussions, research, and trial and error, we identified five essential elements (as shown in Figure 1) of the curriculum development process.

In accordance with service design, our development model takes into account the student experience holistically. The five elements of our development model are intentionally designed to ensure that the students (customers) remain the focus of the CBE learning experience.

Extensive scholarship has been written about competency-based education and authentic assessment. While authenticity, transparency, and intentionality in curriculum development are not new ideas, implementing an efficient process to develop a high-quality CBE learning experience that is truly learner-centered is still an area for experimentation. Higher education still has significant room for progress in making learning and assessment practices more authentic, transparent, and intentional. Our team initially set out to optimize the service that we provided to our students in CBE programs; however, it is our hope that by sharing our journey, we can contribute to the CBE scholarship and help to move forward the development of high-quality, learner-centered, and real-world-relevant curriculum throughout higher education.

The principles of service design helped us to focus course design on our students’ need for career readiness upon graduation so that they can enter the workforce feeling competent and ready to contribute to their field or industry. Capitalizing on the co-creative nature of service design, we devised our development model to create a culture of evaluation which, in turn, helped validate, from many perspectives, the quality of the learning experience as a whole. Using the service design model, members of the team challenged one another to reframe their current thinking with a shared purpose of developing solutions that effectively support student achievement of meaningful outcomes.