A Leader's Guide to Competency-Based Education: From Inception to Implementation

As interest in competency-based education (CBE) continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the need for a practical resource to guide development of high-quality CBE programs led the authors to write this book. Until now, there has been no how-to manual that captures in one place a big picture view of CBE along with the down-to-earth means for building a CBE program.

A variety of pressures are driving the growth in CBE, including the need for alternatives to the current model of higher education (with its dismal completion rates); the potential to better manage the iron triangle of costs, access, and quality; the need for graduates to be better prepared for the workforce; and the demands of adult learners for programs with the flexible time and personalized learning that CBE offers.

Designed to help institutional leaders become more competent in designing, building, and scaling high-quality competency-based education (CBE) programs, this book provides context, guidelines, and process. The process is based on ten design elements that emerged from research funded by the Gates Foundation, and sponsored by AAC&U, ACE, EDUCAUSE, and the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), with thought partners CAEL and Quality Matters. In short, the book will serve administrators, higher education leaders, faculty, staff, and others who have an interest in CBE by:
• Giving context to enable the audience to discover the importance of each design element and to help frame the CBE program (the “why”);
• Providing models, checklists, and considerations to determine the “what” component for each design element;
• Sharing outlines and templates for the design elements to enable institutions to build quality, relevant, and rigorous CBE programs (the “how”).

Laurie Dodge is the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Assessment & Planning and Vice Provost at Brandman University and also serves as the Founding President of the Board of Directors of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN). She has worked in higher education for over 20 years as a faculty member, interim dean, and assessment director. In 2016, she was named one of the “The Sixteen Most Innovative People in Higher Education” by Washington Monthly.

Deborah J. Bushway currently serves as the Provost at Northwest Health Sciences University and as an educational consultant. She has served in a variety of roles prior to this, including Senior Advisor in the Office of the Undersecretary at the Department of Education in Washington, DC., interim associate Dean at the University of Wisconsin – Extension, and the Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Academic Innovation at Capella University.

Charla S. Long is the Executive Director for the Competency-Based Education Network, a national consortium of higher education institutions and statewide systems seeking to design, develop, and scale new models of student learning. Additionally, she leads a consulting firm dedicated to helping institutions with competency-based learning. During 2015, she served as a consultant to Public Agenda on two significant CBE national landscape and field-building projects, funded by both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation. In this role, she provided insights, tools, and support to individuals and institutions seeking to advance competency-based education in the United States. These tools included the CBE Ecosystem Framework, the Shared Design Elements and Emerging Practices Model and Research Report, and the CBExchange conference where hundreds of institutions learned how to build high-quality CBE programs. Prior to this, Long was the founding dean of the College of Professional Studies at Lipscomb University and the creator of their nationally acclaimed competency-based education (CBE) model and badging ecosystem. Long has over 20 years of higher education experience at both public and private institutions in the United States.