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24 Aug 2016
Brief

Key Characteristics of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education (CBE) Programs: A Descriptive Rubric

Cameron Smither, Kelle Parsons, Audrey Peek, and Matthew Soldner

Competency-based education (CBE) is an educational model that, put simply, is based on learning rather than “seat time.”

Recently, many colleges and universities have started innovating with CBE programs, creating new and different structures that vary widely across institutions, and sometimes even across CBE programs within institutions. As the field matures, researchers and institutional leaders have discovered the need for a conceptual tool that would facilitate better descriptions of the core components of any CBE program.

This rubric, drawn from the expertise of leaders within the postsecondary CBE field, is designed to help CBE program leaders, their campus colleagues, and researchers describe key features of their CBE program. This descriptive rubric poses questions across six broad categories:

  1. Institution and program characteristics
  2. Development of competencies
  3. Assessment
  4. Instruction and student support roles
  5. Programmatic flexibility
  6. Financial aid and tuition pricing.

For each question in these categories, the rubric describes the 3-4 most common alternatives in practice in today’s postsecondary CBE landscape.

With a clearer understanding of how CBE is being implemented in each context, researchers and institutional leaders can make more nuanced observations about CBE programs, particularly as they relate to student outcomes, including what kind of results they might expect to see given the program’s design.

PDF icon Key Characteristics of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education Programs: A Descriptive Rubric (PDF)

Related Work

16 May 2016
Brief

Making the Case for Competency-Based Education: Early Lessons From the Field

As competency-based education (CBE) grows in prominence in higher education, leaders of CBE programs will be asked to demonstrate how students in those programs “stack up” against students in traditional non-CBE programs across an array of outcomes, from learning to time-to-degree and affordability. This brief outlines seven considerations for CBE program leaders who want to begin gathering and using rigorous evidence as they build a case for CBE for internal and external audiences.
Topic: 
Education, Postsecondary Education

Further Reading

  • Postsecondary Competency-Based Education
  • Aligning for Learning- Evaluating Connections: Making the Case for Competency-Based Education
  • Getting Started with Evaluation: Making the Case for Competency Based Education
  • On the Path to Success: Early Evidence About the Efficacy of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education Programs
  • Measuring Student Success in Postsecondary Competency-Based Education Programs: Toward a Student Outcomes Metrics Framework
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Kelle Parsons

Kelle Parsons

Senior Researcher

Topic

Education
Postsecondary Education

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