Semester-long classrooms everywhere are missing their students. Is the academic term too long? Are institutions missing big opportunities by being slaves to the traditional calendar? Are we numb to other possibilities to promote learning? To each question my response is “yes!” As my esteemed colleague Kay McClenney says, “…in higher education, for every problem we have a 15-week solution.”
I won’t go deep into the bureaucracy of how states fund their public institutions. Suffice to say the narrow focus is to standardizing the time required to offer a 3 credit-hour class to ensure that no institution short circuits the budget process. When the time that students occupy a classroom seat is made equal across the public sector, we can be sure that learning is equal, right? Well, no.
To catch up with the rest of the organized world, the US push is to help more students to complete degrees. We ought to use this opportunity to develop new pathways for them to demonstrate what they already know so that they don’t need to sit through classes that have been designed in ways that presume they don’t know much. Somehow, many traditional academics have convinced themselves that leapfrogging classes or sequences of classes can’t be done without great harm. We don’t know if this argument is based on harm to students or harm to the curriculum but most often it’s voiced as the former when it’s actually the latter. Accelerating learning can be done, however, and done with rigor, based on competency-based approaches. Too often, we’ve let the undergraduate curriculum become a fortress, and not the tool it should be by providing multiple entry and exit points designed to maximize student learning.
While traditional time-based measures are endemic across higher education their impact is most often felt in community college developmental education programs. Seventy percent or more of new community college students are referred to one or more remedial classes. Most of this group begins postsecondary careers needing three classes in developmental mathematics. It’s quite possible therefore—in the tyranny of a fifteen-week term—that they won’t see the inside of a “regular” college-level classroom until almost two years after they first touch an application blank. Small wonder the probability of these students graduating or transferring to a 4-year college is in the single digits.
Inertia exacts a price. As Kay and others point out, reorganizing developmental curriculum to more fully meet a range of learner needs is daunting work. While there are few guideposts, I’m convinced that much of the angst would evaporate if community colleges would understand and use competencies as units of learning. I’ve seen a handful of community colleges enjoy great success in decomposing the credit hour class into manageable competencies. One of the colleges I coach, Bossier Parish Community College, has had outstanding success in offering individualized pathways for students in developmental math based on mastering specific competencies. BPCC has increased student success rates by an amazing 30 percent in the lowest level of developmental math using competency-based approaches over the traditional fifteen-week approach.
There is a recent, resurgent interest in competencies as curricular building blocks. The Lumina Foundation on Education and its “Tuning USA” initiative is leading the way in facilitating competency-based models for select disciplines in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah. Several years back I edited a sourcebook with some very wise colleagues entitled, Measuring What Matters: Competency-Based Learning Models in Higher Education It was designed as a toolkit for faculty and administrators to understand the layout of the curriculum, to look for overlaps in competencies among courses, and to identify opportunities to accelerate learning. Jossey-Bass indicates that it’s sold well, but given where we’re at with our devotion to the traditional fifteen-week term since it was published, perhaps not well enough.
Originally posted May 2010
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