Education continues to evolve as a rapid rate and competency based education continues to gain momentum in redefining how students are learning and accessing education. The shift from teacher centered to learner centered continues to grow this field of education and more school and programs are now adopting competency based classes, courses and credit programs. Competency based education is available to anyone and anywhere and continues to provide flexibility to learners, transform instructional design world and gain popularity worldwide.
In learning more about competency based education (CBE), I invite you to think about your own educational experience or current teaching practices, think about where they were situated in terms of their purpose, their place and pace? Are they closer to the traditional approach to learning? Moving towards something new and different, stuck in a previous time in history or successfully evolved into something new?
https://www.canva.com/design/DAEtG6BP2Jk/73CyYlIjnWEXQIlYJXUztg/view?website#2
Thank you Asha. You have presented a topic which is not often addressed today and if so, many confuse skills with competency. According to Boyatzis, the father of competencies as a science, this presentation moves the topic into today’s focus on the flexibility of online learning. Online learning indirectly creates that flow of ideas and information in a freer form, which I believe, increases self knowledge and achievement, another arm of competency and frees up our previous self-doubt, a limiting aspect in classical learning. I think that knowing the categories of competencies would enhance this approach and promote growth and learning. Competency based assessment is one way of measuring your attributes and core knowledge. I think within a flexible system, there is further development where new competencies can develop to enhance that which we have as individuals.
The design of a Competency Based Assessment also requires more than just words, As a qualitative and quantitative tool, it must also be tweaked as situations develop and we develop in turn to address and fill gaps. A good example is how educators learned how to teach on-line during the pandemic. The level of competency which grew and developed were inherent as educators were driven to support learning and most important, their students and clients.
Working from home is another example where until last year 2020, health professionals were constricted by old-fashioned and rigid rules of work, and having little choices brought about that shifit by incorporating Internet use to inform and create for patient learning as well as increased and streamlined communication in a way that many in my part of the world, previously simply did not consider workable ideas or solutions
Hi Asha, Great presentation! CBE holds a lot of promise and hopefully with time, it becomes more mainstream. The MIT video you provided really showed how broad the concept of CBE is in terms of application. A theme that I noticed so far in the MET program is that there are all these ways of approaching learning but we still are mostly stuck on the same traditional model despite all the evidence that supports alternative ways of learning. I wonder why that is? I do not work in the K-12 system but I think even letting students know what competencies they are working towards can be a big help towards success.
Thanks for your post Asha! in response to Mitchell, this is a useful website I use with colleagues to get started. I find the language they use helpful.
https://www.challengebasedlearning.org/blog/
Some books that helped me understand it as well are:
Launch – John Spencer
Empowered Learning – John Spencer
Inquiry Mindset – Trevor Mackenzie
Also starting with small attainable tasks to understand the competencies first and then growing into larger ones..
Well done presentation Asha.
I love Competency Based Assessment (can’t use the acronym CBE because that’s the school board I work for) in concept. In practice I find it difficult to implement.
In my context as a teacher, I am unable to modify my learning outcomes. I can adapt them for sure (adapt = different modes of demonstrating an outcome, whereas modifying is changing the outcome).
In your research did you find anywhere they are using a curricular backbone so as to make this possible in all grades?