Are Post-Pandemic Campuses Finally Ready for Competency-Based Education?
Competency-based schooling is a type of massive concepts about tips on how to reshape schooling that’s been round for some time. And followers of the method say this time of change occasioned by the pandemic is an efficient second to offer it a better look.
The fundamental thought of competency-based schooling, or CBE, is that this: What if the best way to get a level or certificates was to show to a school that you just’ve realized the required data and abilities. It wouldn’t matter precisely how, or the place you realized the data—or competencies. Colleges could be within the enterprise of certifying what college students know, and giving them the teaching and supplies wanted to fill in any gaps to earn the credential.
For this week’s EdSurge podcast we checked in with a longtime proponent of competency primarily based schooling: Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. And he lays out his newest ideas concerning the method in his new ebook, “Students First: Equity, Access and Opportunity in Higher Education.”
LeBlanc himself is a primary era faculty pupil who has lengthy experimented with concepts to assist develop entry to larger schooling. And through the years he has led Southern New Hampshire University to grow to be a mega-university on-line to serve college students who can’t get to its conventional campus, with greater than 130,000 on-line college students.
He has additionally introduced Competency Based Education to his personal college, in a program at Southern New Hampshire referred to as College for America. But he admits that his CBE experiment has not grown as quick as he’d hoped. And that’s as a result of shifting to this mannequin is a extremely massive, and actually exhausting change for schools. But he thinks the method may develop, particularly within the aftermath of the pandemic, and he has a proposal on tips on how to get there.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music, or wherever you take heed to podcasts, or use the participant on this web page. Below is an edited sampling of the dialog.
EdSurge: In your ebook you say that the largest problem to competency-based schooling is that it requires extra from everybody within the system—professors and directors, but additionally from college students. What did you imply by that?
Paul LeBlanc: If you consider larger schooling right now, folks joke that “D” nonetheless stands for diploma. We let college students slide by on a regular basis, and we’re graduating folks with, in lots of situations, not a whole lot of readability about what they know, what they’ll do. The transcript is a black field for most exterior folks. If I’m hiring anyone and I say, ‘Oh, you took managerial accounting.’ I can infer, possibly, what you studied, however I do not truly know the way good you might be, what abilities you have got, what precise data you have got.
[Take] nurses, for instance. We graduate nurses and we all know what that appears like. They’ve received to take a nationwide licensure examination, their state board.
But when you speak to the heads of scientific staffs of healthcare methods, they are going to let you know that nurses usually are not able to hit the ground once they graduate. They would say, ‘They don’t actually have the skills we need them to have in order for us to put them to work.’
I feel a part of what’s actually highly effective about this mannequin [of competency-based education] is that it forces us to be a lot clearer concerning the claims we make.
You say within the ebook that addressing the difficulty solely at schools is like cleansing up air pollution downstream whereas the manufacturing unit upstream continues to place chemical compounds within the river. What modifications do you advocate for Ok-12 to higher put together college students for the competency-based faculty that you just’re advocating for?
On one degree they’ve the identical situation. Which is that they are progress in a kind of structured, sequential manner, which has to do with what age you might be.
We know that the identical set of grade inflation [happens]. We know that fifty p.c of scholars arrive on faculty campuses, not truly able to do faculty degree math or English. So it’s going to lay naked. It will shed a light-weight on the problems of preparation. So it will drive larger rigor on Ok-12.
And you do have Ok-12 methods together with right here in my residence state of New Hampshire which are shifting to competency-based frameworks. So the opposite factor this enables in fact, are children to maneuver sooner or slower by the system.
I feel it was one of many virtues and everybody loves the tales of pace—, the one who finishes the two-year affiliate diploma in only one yr. We have these tales. But I like to inform the tales of the coed who took a yr and a half to get by the writing competency. And the explanation I like to inform that story is that once they’ve completed, I can stand behind the declare I make that the coed truly will have the ability to write. Maybe not like Hemingway, however they’re going to have the ability to do the type of office writing that we outline as a core competency in a given program. And that is what employers love about competency-based schooling. It provides us a typical language, however it additionally provides them the reassurance [that students have the skills needed].
For the entire interview, take heed to this week’s EdSurge Podcast.
