Charla S. Long likes to use an image in the presentations she makes about competency-based education programs. It’s of a woman carrying an elephant on her back.
The picture is meant to caution institutions against seeing these programs as a quick fix by describing what they truly entail: new policies, payment structures, academic calendars, rethought curricula, faculty roles, and ways to record transcripts.
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Charla S. Long likes to use an image in the presentations she makes about competency-based education programs. It’s of a woman carrying an elephant on her back.
The picture is meant to caution institutions against seeing these programs as a quick fix by describing what they truly entail: new policies, payment structures, academic calendars, rethought curricula, faculty roles, and ways to record transcripts.
“It’s hard work,” says Ms. Long, 46, executive director of the Competency-Based Education Network, a consortium of 17 institutions and two public systems of higher education that are guiding the development of this educational model.
And that development has been particularly swift in recent years. About 600 colleges are looking to adopt competency-based programs, which allow students to make progress based on whether they demonstrate mastery of material, not on how much time they’ve spent in a course — the traditional standard known as “seat time.”
Institutions see these programs as a way to reach an often poorly served market of adults who are older than postsecondary education’s traditional 18-to-21-year-old demographic. The hope is that competency-based programs can hit an elusive goal: increasing people’s access to affordable and high-quality forms of higher education.
She leads a movement to ensure quality in competency-based education.
“There are a lot of eyes on the movement watching if we can deliver on the value proposition,” says Ms. Long. “We want to be about responsible innovation.”
If competency-based education delivers on its promise, Ms. Long will be a big reason why. The approach gained traction in 2016, as programs moved from start-up to expansion. Some of the largest and earliest adopters have now been around long enough that their work can be studied for broader lessons. Amid such growth, the quality of these programs will go a long way toward determining whether competency-based learning succeeds or flames out.
Ms. Long has played a key role, even if she tends to deflect credit to the network she leads. She guided the drafting of a set of standards, released in October, that outline the hallmarks of quality. They consist of eight overarching ideas that should characterize programs, like being coherent and complete, and having competencies that are clear, measurable, and meaningful. From these ideas come 61 standards, like giving students access to faculty experts who play “an active, central role” in programs, and creating effective assessments.
As institutions have rushed to join the ranks of competency-based providers, Ms. Long’s emphasis on quality may have far-reaching consequences, says Alison Kadlec, senior vice president and director of higher-education and work-force programs for Public Agenda, a nonprofit organization that works with Ms. Long’s group.
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“She could take other focuses,” Ms. Kadlec says, like helping providers market their programs and recruit students, or building the network into a formal association. “Her biggest contribution is that she has chosen to focus where she should.”
For Ms. Long, taking over the network at the beginning of the year marked a logical progression. As a tenured faculty member at Lipscomb University, she developed her own competency-based education program. Her experience there serves to remind her of what’s at stake. She recalls how some adult students were so leery of going back to college that they couldn’t look her in the eye when they first met. “It took everything they had to come onto a college campus again and walk up the stairs to my office,” she says. She reassured them by framing their learning in the concrete language of competency-based education, the things they would be able to know and do. That kind of description makes education less abstract, she says, without dumbing it down.
“None of us want bad actors looking to do the cheap and easy thing,” Ms. Long says of the field. “You’ve got to carry that elephant.”
Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
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Dan Berrett is a senior editor for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He joined The Chronicle in 2011 as a reporter covering teaching and learning. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
