Adapting to the different strategies for student learning is essential in order to prepare students better. The report covers a need to meet the student demand for new models of learning opportunities. Such as industry needs, training programs, and competency-based education.

According to some, this is the core shift needed to make Competency-Based Education (CBE) work, in practice. The idea isn’t to sort people out by testing everyone at the same time but to allow people to develop the needed competencies at their own pace. In fact, some discussions of CBE revolve around the notion that a learner failing an exam demonstrates that it wasn’t administered at the right time. May sound really strange in the current system for formal education but there are plenty of similar models outside of formal education, including in (at least the popular culture version of) martial arts.

Really? These aren’t uncontroversial, to say the least. For instance, discussion board interactions often call for careful, mixed-method work with an eye to preventing instructor effect and confirmation bias. “Time on task” is almost a codeword for distinctions between models of learning. Research in cognitive science gives very nuanced value to “time spent on task” while the Malcolm Gladwells of the world usurp some research results. A major insight behind Competency-Based Education is that it can allow for some variance in terms of “time on task”. So it’s kind of surprising that this summary puts those two things to the fore.

A big part of both Competency-Based Education and the open-ended side of Open Education.

The new frontier!

Souvent l’étape la plus difficile.