Dive Brief:
- When developing new programs such as competency-based degrees, it is important to design from scratch, rather than creating additional offerings within a system that was made for traditional higher education.
- According to eCampus News, important strategies also include keeping content at the center of planning, rather than making technology king, and maintaining the important role of faculty in student learning — though the faculty role surely has to change for new delivery models.
- Financial aid and transcripts are among the systems that need an overhaul to support competency-based education, and experts also favor making alternative pathways lead to a degree, because that is still an option students want regardless of how nontraditional the program is.
Dive Insight:
Hundreds of institutions are developing new competency-based education programs, offering returning students the opportunity to move more quickly through courses and modules that teach skills they have already mastered. The idea is that degree progress should be measured by content mastery, not by time in a classroom. This creates major problems for traditional higher education systems, which have been designed for generations based on the credit hour.
Accreditors and the federal government have yet to come to a consensus about how to define high-quality competency-based education, which may be slowing down innovation at some institutions who are at the mercy of more rigid overseers. A handful of schools have received access to federal financial aid to expand access to their programs, a number that likely will grow rapidly in the coming years, especially if the Higher Education Act rewrite includes new processes for allowing innovation.