All aspects of HE can benefit from transformation

There have always been challenges in higher education. However, the current pandemic has exacerbated all of them at once like an avalanche. Many of us at Western Governors University (WGU) feel called to answer some of the tough questions about succeeding at online teaching and learning because of the positive outcomes our student body has achieved.

WGU is in a position – indeed, a vantage point – along the path to providing quality online education and so can answer some of the questions that are circulating in these times of uncertainty and rapid change. Just as there are myriad reasons to engage in face-to-face, there are equally as many reasons for different types of online education. Online competency-based education (CBE) is one viable option for students and faculty.


Ascending the steep slope

What has become clear in the last months is that traditional face-to-face instruction cannot be simply transferred to an online modality with the flick of a switch. This is also true for students who cannot become online learners simply because they have logged onto your institution’s learning platform.

Delivery methods must be appropriately matched to both the educational content and the learning styles appropriate for that content.

Once that is done, we must examine how to support a variety of learners receiving that content. This is neither easy nor fast work.

Therefore, the whiplash transition to online learning that was necessary to protect the health of our families and communities is not to be lambasted or harshly criticised. Every person employed in education has done as much as possible to support individual students in their transitions.

However, this under-preparedness should also serve as a learning tool so that our educational system is not this ill prepared again. We can anticipate other disruptions, but none of us can know how those disruptions will manifest themselves. We do know, however, that future disruptions are likely.

The very first mountain to climb is how to translate time, for time has been the traditional measure of student progress. Schools have traditionally been mandated to provide a certain number of hours and days for student learning and students must attend a certain number of days or a percentage of that time in order to progress to the next class level.

Post-secondary institutions allocate ‘credit hours’ to indicate how many hours a week a class will meet over a term and how much time a student should expect to spend studying or participating in outside-the-class learning activities.

The false assumption that time equals learning has, due to the pandemic, been dragged out of the shadows of habit and routine. Marching in rhythm to the constant pace of traditional learning has not been shown to be the most effective method of learning.

In an attempt to acknowledge differences in learner preparedness and pace of learning, traditional classes in elementary and middle schools have been ‘tracked’ to a certain extent by ‘ability grouping’ wherein students have been designated as remedial, average or gifted and talented. But this system does not account properly for the pacing needs of its students and its worth is still being debated after 70 years.

It is particularly noteworthy that experts appear to agree that the imposed pacing in ‘ability grouping’ has significantly disadvantaged those who were designated as ‘at risk’. Many who should have been given a gifted-and-talented opportunity were passed over due to the inherent biases of measuring for that potential.

The current pandemic has radically disrupted our ‘normal’ and revealed the disparities in the traditional, time- and place-based learning models. We should be asking: How do we make our education systems more individually responsive to the needs of our students?

Why not construct a system that meets students where they are and gives them what they need inside and outside of institutions in order to be successful?

Let’s take this opportunity to end the ‘one-size-fits-all’ factory model of education.

CBE, because it is decoupled from time, permits individual tailoring to a student’s demonstrated performance and mobility in the pacing of coursework attuned to the learning undertaken at that point. It does not pigeonhole a student in a ‘track’ and, therefore, avoids the problem when a ‘gifted’ student is enrolled in a more challenging class that does not ‘fit’ with his or her actual aptitude in that subject.

Conversely, a student who may not have been traditionally recognised as ‘academically talented’ may progress at an accelerated pace in a subject where he or she is demonstrating advanced competence. Freed from pre-determinations, CBE allows students to accelerate in the courses where their ‘talent’ complements the subject matter and to slow down when another subject takes more time to master.

Competency-based education removes time as an indicator of learning because, in truth, it is not a good proxy measurement. Since 1906, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching questioned the adequacy of the credit hour to accurately measure learning. In 2013, the Carnegie Foundation formed a committee to “consider how a revised unit, based on competency rather than time, could improve teaching and learning in high schools, colleges and universities”.

Founded in 1997, WGU has tackled this challenge because it was based on that very principle of measuring learning by directly assessing competency. Since then, WGU has sought continuous improvement in term-by-term review of course and student data. The Carnegie Report noted that “[a]chieving this goal would require the development of rigorous standards, assessments and accountability systems – difficult work, especially in the field of higher education, where educational aims are highly varied and faculty autonomy is deeply ingrained”.

However, higher education cannot remain entrenched in a system just because moving away from it poses challenges. Millennials and centennials (aka Gen Z), those who have never known a world without technology integrated into their everyday lives, represent not only a social shift in a world that is now comfortable online, but also the new balancing act between work and school and the ability to demonstrate direct application of their education to employers in the online world.

Equality issues

There are multiple models of online teaching currently being employed; WGU uses one of them. Technology has enabled us to do many things that were formerly only possible in physical proximity and where time was a commonality among all learners.

Where textbooks and teachers were finite and geographically constrained, the quality of education could be predicted more or less by the socio-economic status of the students. However, as the pandemic has demonstrated, taking those commonalities of time and place away, learning is happening on many different schedules.

Technology can provide synchronous or asynchronous delivery methods, simulations, game theory learning, chat rooms, forums for discussion posts, pop-up tutorials (with engaging backgrounds), peer group time and a host of other creative learning platforms that not only engage the learner but also demonstrate equivalent learning outcomes.

On our way up to the summit of excellence in self-paced, online learning, there are rocky issues to overcome. Anecdotally, in the pandemic, instructors have seen the vast differences in work ethic, work production and work time needed to complete an assignment now that students are physically decoupled from their traditional learning environment.

However, these outcomes have been influenced by other factors not directly tied to individual student learning, but rather the inequities and barriers that students may be facing. The pandemic has exposed the access barriers and inequalities on a variety of scales; these obstacles cannot be ignored.

Students and teachers alike are struggling to acquire appropriate devices for online learning and to find reliable internet access, and some are struggling with its cost. It is the right time to examine how to level that playing field. It will take additional technology tools and training to deal with this myriad of variables, but it is an ethical imperative to do so now that the broad extent and pervasiveness of this ‘achievement gap’ has been brought out into the open.

Higher education’s promise to be a ‘great equaliser’ in providing a means to improve personal circumstances and open avenues for advancement has not been realised to its full potential.

There is an educational ‘arms race’ wherein those without access to a quality education are falling rapidly behind.

One of the greatest factors regarding access is not just tuition; it’s having to juggle life’s other requirements – employment and family are two of the biggest impediments when a student needs to attend classes on the institution’s time and place requirements. So, what happens if we remove the time and place restrictions using online CBE to soften the edges of this rocky terrain?

Finding the right gear

So far, we have identified the problems encountered on the climb to the CBE solution but, practically speaking, how does an institution create CBE programmes and, importantly, accredited CBE programmes? It starts with an examination of each and every competency (an identifiable piece of knowledge or skill) that would be expected of a functioning professional, practitioner or graduate in each field of study.

In other words, what does the graduate of this programme need to know or be able to do? This exercise breaks down the traditional student learning outcomes for programmes and courses into insular learning objectives that can be assessed individually.

The exact number will vary depending on the size and scope of the credential in question. Each objective is then weighted on a conventional taxonomy scale to assign accurately the level of difficulty to the task.

For example, the lower end of the scale represents the ability of the student to know (‘identify’ or ‘explain’) while the higher end requires the student to demonstrate mastery (‘analyse’ or ‘create’). An algorithm is applied to each course and the number of competency units represented in that course can be calculated.

Now we have groups of competencies allocated appropriately to individual courses. To determine whether students have mastered them, our assessment designers need to create psychometrically sound testing.

Our disaggregated faculty model also has distinct roles for course, learning resource and assessment designers, again to play to our experts’ strengths. This is possible at WGU’s scale of operations and may not be adoptable wholesale. However, some disaggregation may be available to optimise the talents and interests of your faculty.

These assessment designers align each testing item – objective or performance – to each competency. The assessments can take many forms and each is accompanied by a detailed rubric for the evaluation faculty to use. Evaluation faculty are trained to provide reliability and an objective eye when giving feedback. (Course instructors do not evaluate the assessments in order to eliminate bias).

Data regarding each assessment is collected for quality review. This means that each assessment item can be reviewed for rigour and relevancy and can, therefore, be updated or replaced to meet the changing needs of the market. Analysis of the assessment results is made available to faculty and staff in quarterly reviews, a much shorter timescale than most traditional coursework.

A data-driven approach

This is another benefit of WGU’s CBE model: We start a new cohort of students each month, data is updated continuously and any corrective action can be pinpointed quickly and assessments and-or learning resources modified accordingly.

This kind of data-driven design and decision-making has the potential to take much of the variability out of learning outcomes and serve the students, the instructors and potential employers better.

While it may be difficult to reproduce this comprehensive and relatively short cycle of continuous improvement without great effort and, potentially, scale, we are presenting it here as a model.

Many institutions may have some capacity through their learning management systems to deploy uniform assessments supported by detailed rubrics for evaluation and collection of results for a unified analysis.

Leading with this service mentality has also led to another WGU difference: eliminating ranking of students by their ability to score well on tests and exams on the first attempt. The mission of WGU is to improve quality and expand post-secondary educational opportunities to those for whom traditional education is not practical or desirable.

With the focus on achievement, we can support that non-traditional student in multiple ways to attain a degree or credential goal.

WGU supports a system that sets a functional competency level that students meet or do not meet as determined by the psychometrically designed assessments. Students who are accustomed to more traditional scoring may want an explanation of a pass score; the equivalent letter grade is a traditional ‘B’ so all WGU students hold a Grade Point Average of 3.0 for courses and degrees completed successfully.

A traditional grading and-or ranking system merely demonstrates the capacity of the student at that singular point in time to score well. WGU’s goal is to produce a set of graduates, each of whom has demonstrated mastery of every competency that he or she will need to succeed in a chosen field.

Traditional grades may permit excellence in one area of coursework while another area is lacking.

WGU graduates are all at least equally competent in all areas – no hierarchy is established by WGU, their educator; rather, graduates are able to rise to the level they set for themselves as they ascend in their fields of practice.

This system of evaluation echoes many of the professional-entry exams that require candidates to demonstrate competency by surpassing a psychometrically set cut-score.

Onwards and upwards

The current pandemic has disrupted lives, livelihoods and entire industries. Higher education has not been spared; the ‘ivory tower’ cannot protect against such an insidious, albeit tiny, foe. We each are operating outside of our comfort zone, but disruption does not always end in discomfort. We can use this situation to meet some of the challenges that higher education has been facing and will continue to face in both the short and long term.

Each institution will need to discover which modalities are most appropriate to deliver on its individual mission. Higher education has long stated that the diversity in institutions’ visions and academic community are vital to keep American education vibrant; this is, perhaps, the moment to pivot to work on relevancy and access.

Evidenced on a variety of both social and traditional media, this is a shared call for educational institutions to reflect on current practices and avoid a return to the status quo. Institutions that are preparing to return to normal without applying lessons learned about preparedness, quality, access and ‘future-proofing’ have lost the vision and mission of higher education.

Strategic planning can be a challenging exercise and many universities often encounter a disconnect between strategy and innovation – they assume that their current business model can extend into the future with only incremental improvements or they remain uncommitted to a variety of visions for the future, many of which are impractical.

It is the duty of higher education to evolve and serve all of those who wish to attain a relevant learning credential in whatever form that takes.

All aspects of higher education can benefit from transformation, whether a ‘teaching-forward’, research, or clinical-technical institution. Accreditors will need to learn how to evaluate institutional and programmatic effectiveness to assure students and their families that the quality of the academic offerings is held to the same standards as traditional contact hour classes.

This health crisis has forced students to become distance learners and institutions to become distance education providers, but the lesson it teaches us is that some students and some programmes are well-suited to this modality. It behoves higher education, then, to become well suited to it, too.

The challenge to be surmounted is to create a practical vision for the future – what does your institution need to look like in the next six months for you, your students, your instructors and your stakeholders? What does long-term success look like for your institution? Is CBE the solution to all issues in providing quality education?

Not at all. But what we have learned from the pandemic is that viable options need to be in place and the provision of education needs to flex according to the needs of the students. How can you adapt your current strengths to new modalities or realities that are coming? Can you build flexibility into your five-year plan to account for contingencies? It is up to all of us in higher education to be ready to pivot to the changing realities our students are facing.

Linda A Wendling, JD, LLM, is senior manager, academic engagement, Colleges of Business and IT, at Western Governors University, United States.

For more articles on ‘Employability in the Digital Age’, see our Transformative Leadership hub.