Regent featured in EDUCAUSE Review’s Competency-Based Education: Technology Challenges and Opportunities Article
Recently, Regent Education was featured on EDUCAUSE Review’s website in an article written by Mark Leuba, managing director at Pathway Technology Partners, TIP Project Leader, and IMS Global CBE facilitator. Below is a preview of it:
Competency-based education (CBE) has elicited strong interest among educators and education stakeholders due to its potential to meet students where they are in their education journey and provide a more personalized path to completion. A typical CBE program has a curriculum structured to demonstrate learning in clearly articulated competencies, is often self-paced, is agnostic as to the source of learning while maintaining clear and transparent learning standards, and has an emphasis on authentic assessment, which evaluates what the learner knows and can do through real-life demonstrations and projects.
Unfortunately, the model’s practical benefits are tempered by the significant technology challenges and barriers to CBE program adoption, roadblocks due to limits in (and among) higher education software products. As a community, the products used to manage our institutions and their teaching and learning processes are all deeply rooted in a credit hour–based, term-based, and course-based educational delivery model. CBE is not a new idea,1 but its promise as a potential solution to critical issues in higher education (including affordability, completion, and transparency of learning outcomes) has stimulated renewed interest and significant growth, a trend forecast to continue.2 But CBE growth is in fact stymied, along with its benefits to many of today’s students, due a lack of software support.
In the early days of the CBE transition, suppliers (as a group) did not respond quickly and aggressively to the need for different features to manage CBE processes. This might now be changing, as this article explains. It is still too early to declare the problem solved, but there is clear evidence of positive action underway. Through the efforts of a partnership between the Competency-Based Education Network (CBEN) and the IMS Global Learning Consortium, the tide seems to be turning, and a roadmap for effective IT supports for CBE is taking form; this change is exemplified through the Technical Interoperability Pilot (TIP) project.
To read the full article, please visit http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/10/competency-based-education-technology-challenges-and-opportunities