Competency-Based Education Programs versus Traditional Dat...
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/competency-based-educati...
Competency-Based Education Programs
versus Traditional Data Management
by Leo Irakliotis and Sally M. Johnstone
Published on Monday, May 19, 2014
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Key Takeaways
Competency-based education programs challenge traditional data management
approaches across the academic institution because they defy conventional
notions of time in relation to fixed-length terms, synchronous delivery, and studentfaculty interactions.
Initial results from a study of colleges implementing CBE highlight short- and
long-term solutions to timing challenges and emerging practices that can help
ensure CBE program success.
Among the "not so bad" practices were to ensure that short-term fixes don't
delay work on long-term solutions to CBE challenges and that key stakeholders
be enlisted to support the required policy, practice, and system changes.
Leo Irakliotis is a Chicago-based consultant for academic strategy and analytics. Sally Johnstone is
vice president for Academic Advancement, Western Governors University.
As competency-based education (CBE) programs continue to develop across the country, administrators and
faculty members find their campuses' information systems too rigid for this new learning modality. To assist
colleges in transforming traditional campus programs into competency-based ones — as well as to investigate
the challenges entailed — Western Governors University (WGU) worked with 11 community colleges in five
states to design and implement CBE academic projects, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and the US Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training
(TAACCCT) program.
Here, we discuss the project, focusing on the challenges faced in implementing CBE and various short- and
long-term solutions.
CBE Overview
CBE is a significant departure from a classroom-based model and focuses on serving students in a more
personalized fashion. The basic tenet behind CBE is flipping the time–mastery relationship. In a
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classroom-based model, all students start and end their learning experience at the same time. During a term of
study, some students will master most of the materials and earn high grades; others will master less of the
material and earn lower grades; and still others will master only about half the material and receive a failing
grade. So, while these failing students know a considerable portion of the material, their only option is to take
the entire class over again. This is discouraging to students, and some might well give up on the whole highereducation experience.
In CBE programs, students work toward mastery at their own pace, within the constraints of financial aid,
institutional, and state policies. When students demonstrate mastery of the skills and knowledge designated by
a course's faculty, they pass the course. Students can progress through courses either sequentially or take
several at time, depending on their study habits and time constraints. The CBE model has two key elements:
1. The time it takes an individual to reach full mastery is totally student-centric.
2. All students must demonstrate mastery to complete the program of study.
Systems Impact
At WGU, students can enroll and commence a term at the first of any month. Tuition for most programs is a flat
rate of approximately $3,000 for a six-month term. Students can take as many courses as they can manage.
On any day, many students are starting and many are finishing courses. Activities within any six-month term are
defined by students, not by institutional schedules related to grade deadlines or how many students are
enrolled on a specific census day. This student-centric scheduling challenges the usual configuration of learning
management systems (LMSs) and student information systems (SISs).
Most LMSs and SISs are configured to work on fixed-length terms that begin and end on specific dates.
Enrollment is open for a short time during the beginning of terms, and terms are determined by institutional
schedules. Grades are expected within a few days of the term's end. Even if students somehow complete a
course early — such as in independent study courses — their final grade isn't official until the term ends.
CBE provides a framework for the student-centric timing of learning activities. To support CBE programs, LMSs
and SISs must support transactions when the student requires them, not when the institutional schedule allows
them. Although many existing LMSs and SISs can be customized to allow such transactions at any time, most
are not configured to do so. Furthermore, once an LMS or SIS has been installed and accepted by the
institution, modifications and customizations are usually costly and time-consuming.
The CBE Project: Real-World Experiences
Our partner colleges (see table 1) began enrolling students in CBE pilot programs starting in the fall (2013) and
spring (2014) terms. The colleges have functional LMSs and SISs configured to accommodate students taking
multiple classes on fixed-length terms. Some colleges use state or home-grown LMSs and SISs; others use
commercial products, including Canvas, Blackboard, Angel, and Desire 2 Learn. After the colleges had a full
term of trying to fit square pegs into their systems' rounds holes, we checked in with them to find out what
worked well and what did not. To overcome the rigidity of their installed systems, our partner colleges devised a
two-pronged approach. In the short-term, ad hoc solutions enabled the launch of the pilot projects. To find more
long-term solutions, CBE champions at each college are engaging institutional leadership to develop policies
and priorities that will formalize time-independent transactions.
Table 1. Partner Community Colleges
College
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Austin Community College
Austin, Texas
Bellevue College
Bellevue, Washington
Broward College
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Columbia Basin College
Pasco, Washington
Edmonds Community College
Lynnwood, Washington
Ivy Tech Community College
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Ivy Tech Community College
Lafayette, Indiana
Lone Star Community College
Houston, Texas
Sinclair Community College
Dayton, Ohio
Community College of Spokane
Spokane, Washington
Valencia College
Orlando, Florida
Short-Term Solutions
Short-term, ad hoc solutions are based initially on collegial understanding through gentlemen and ladies'
agreements. Launching a CBE project requires administrative flexibility to handle exceptions and deviations
from standard procedures. And, although they do not violate policy or compliance requirements, such
exceptions require additional work and recourse to procedures that might be difficult for a lean operation to
maintain. It is therefore important to
know who "owns" the authority to grant the required exceptions;
develop a working relationship with these owners; and
establish an understanding between owners and project leaders for the duration of the exception-handling
period.
These exception authority owners are potential key partners in influencing long-term solutions.
Another ad hoc solution is to implement off-the-shelf tools and applications to meet short-term data
management needs. Edmonds Community College uses Podio to capture and manage information for students
enrolled in the CBE pilot project. Podio is a cloud-based project management system that can also function as
a student relationship management application. Edmonds used Podio to get the CBE project off the ground,
and its staff members are part of a statewide team influencing the upgrade of the SIS and LMS to handle future
CBE students.
Other partner colleges use Access databases and scripted Excel spreadsheets to track students enrolled in
their CBE pilot programs. All of these ad hoc solutions require manual data entry between stopgap applications
and the institutional SIS.
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Long-Term Possibilities
According to Van Davis of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, ad hoc solutions are great during
the startup phase, but they carry long-term risks and might push institutions into complacency.1 Because
exception handling and third-party applications can support a program in the beginning, Davis worries that
administrators might feel less urgency about implementing new institutional policies and practices to bring the
CBE programs into the mainstream. As the CBE program's enrollment grows, however, institutions will discover
that exception handling and manual data interfaces are costly and inefficient.
Staff members at other partner colleges agree with Davis's characterization of these ad hoc approaches.
Clearly, it's critical to develop long-term solutions focused on regularizing practices and systems and thereby
formalizing CBE programs at each college. Nancy Thibeault, Dean of Distance Learning and Instructional
Support at Sinclair College, indicates that manual workarounds "need to be automated in order to be scalable
and sustainable." Thibeault emphasizes that "it's not just about the SIS and LMS. It's about process for intake,
enrollment, learner support that is just as (if not more) critical" in system support for students in CBE
programs.2
At Sinclair, rolling starts were implemented by scheduling 12 individual course sections, each with a different
Monday start date. A single content shell was created in the LMS, through which all students in the course
interact with the content, instructor, and classmates. The section and content shells are used to align
enrollments with conventional academic terms, but allow students to start a new course when needed. Initially,
a staff member manually moved students from the section shells to the content shells. However, after the initial
term, the college's IT staff was able to automate the process.
The Sinclair project adopted the college's Student Success Plan tool to track and log all enrollment steps for
students, create action plans, and record student interactions and journal entries. Weekly student progress
reports are generated from the LMS database to monitor logins, assignment submission, test grades, course
progress, and overall course grade. Students flagged for high-risk behaviors are prioritized for intervention.
Discussion
CBE obviously imposes data management requirements across the entire academic operation. Central to these
requirements is the time independence of transactions, such as those related to enrollment, student-faculty
meetings, student-centric and -timed grade entries, financial aid disbursements, and on-demand availability of
transcripts.
Long-term solutions must consider the complexity of required modifications. It might be easier to plan
modifications on the LMS side rather than the SIS side. For example, Van Davis described to us an approach in
which a small group of colleges reported that they used the Blackboard LMS to support competency-based
modules that could be combined to map into a traditional course. From Blackboard's perspective, these
modules were treated just like courses. The traditional course existed on the Banner SIS. As students
completed the competency modules, they earned grades for each one they mastered. At the end, an average
grade was computed for the corresponding course on the SIS side. For now, the school is entering these
grades manually, but it is also developing an automated solution. In this case, it was easier to use the LMS
because competency modules were treated just like course objects; creating modular courses on the school's
SIS would have been difficult.
Key Practices
Implementing a CBE program is a daunting task for most colleges. Such programs defy conventional notions of
fixed-length terms, synchronous delivery, and student-faculty interactions.
Based on the experiences of our partner colleges to date, we identified a few key steps that reflect appropriate
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(or "not so bad") practices:
Ad hoc solutions should not delay discussion of long-term solutions for a CBE program's delivery practices
and formal systems.
Key stakeholders must be identified and enlisted to support the necessary policy, practice, and system
changes; such support might be found in executive sponsorship from the college's president, chief
information officer, student services leadership, or senior financial aid officials.
Establish gentlemen or ladies' agreements for the duration of short-term fixes and for the timetable to
deliver long-term solutions.
Establish triggers and milestones expressed in numbers of students and time duration. Entering grades by
hand for 10 students a month might seem easy, but when it is done repeatedly for six or 12 months, it can
become burdensome. When the number of students rises to 25, 50, and 80 a month, manual data entry will
definitely become problematic.
Communicate to LMS vendors the urgency of modularity and flexibility, as it is essential for supporting CBE
programs. Some LMS vendors are already developing solutions for CBE support. This is the time for
schools to influence the design and direction for CBE enhancements of traditional LMSs.
When implementing stop-gap solutions, always be mindful of data portability. The CIO must be aware of
the stopgap application and of a plan to eventually transform and load the data into the institution's
information system of record. In this context, application interoperability is an important priority, although
we recognize that such conventions are still nascent in the field of academic services software.
Four of our partner colleges began enrolling students in fall 2013, and another six enrolled students in spring
2014. The lessons summarized here are just the beginning of what we are all learning as colleges transform
more traditional approaches into competency-based programs. We hope that these early lessons can assist
others as they start down this path.
Acknowledgments
This report is based on research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and
conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the Gates Foundation's positions or policies.
Notes
1. Private communication between Van Davis and author Leo Irakliotis.
2. Private communication between Nancy Thibeault and author Leo Irakliotis.
© 2014 Leo Irakliotis and Sally M. Johnstone. The text of this EDUCAUSE Review online article is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Leo Irakliotis
Leo Irakliotis is academic strategy consultant with over 15 years of experience as a university
professor, program director, and dean. His expertise includes post-traditional, professional, and
graduate education combining new and time-honored modalities of learning, including continuing education,
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competency-based programs, technology-mediated learning, and learning analytics.
Sally M. Johnstone
Sally M. Johnstone is the Vice President for Academic Advancement at the Western Governors
University, a competency-based, on-line institution headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Prior to joining WGU in October 2011, she was the Provost and Vice President for Academic
Affairs at a traditional comprehensive university, Winona State University in Minnesota, USA. She also spent over
15 years at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). Her experiences include work on
policy issues for higher education institutions and system organizations, inter-institutional collaborations, quality
assurance issues, development and evaluation for both domestic and international projects. She has worked with
UNESCO on education and open educational resource issues for over a decade. Dr. Johnstone serves on the
editorial boards for Change magazine (USA) and the Journal of Open Learning (UK). She has authored dozens of
articles, books, and reports on issues of integrating information and communication technology into academics.
Johnstone earned her Ph. D. in experimental psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Tags from the EDUCAUSE Library
Data Administration and Management
New Models
Student Success
Competency-based Education (CBE)
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