Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge interviews Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University about competency-based education and his expectations for how he envisions CBE at his university. 

• How does competency-based learning compare to other learning styles? 

• Read about the methods that CBE advocates say work the most effectively. 

The phrase “competency-based education” is quite a mouthful, but it was all the rage a few years ago among college leaders looking to expand access to their programs. The idea can sound radical, since it often involves doing away with course structures as we know them, to focus on having students prove they can master a series of skills or concepts one at a time.

It’s safe to say that competency-based education hasn’t caught on as widely as its promoters hoped, and these days you rarely hear much about it. In part that’s because some serious questions have been raised about the model.

We talked with one of the pioneers of bringing the approach to a traditional university, Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University:

EdSurge: A few years ago, Southern New Hampshire spun off College For America, with the idea of expanding access to higher ed by trying a competency-based model. You had ambitious enrollment goals. Have you seen the demand that you expected?

LeBlanc: Not at the velocity at which we originally hoped. It takes a while, and it’s longer than we would like because we have been a B2B offering [partnering with employers, who subsidize the program for their employees]. You know, it's easy to get pilots, but it takes a long time to then move through the corporate organization, the approvals at every level.

Because it is hard to explain, can you walk us through what the education itself looks like?

Yeah, so we don't do exams. It's all project-based, and those projects look like the kinds of work you would be asked to do in the workplace.

Read the full article about competency-based learning by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge