A Leader's Guide to Competency-Based Education

Designed to help institutional leaders become more competent in designing, building, and scaling high-quality competency-based education (CBE) programs, this book provides context, guidelines, and process.

Laurie Dodge is the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Assessment & Planning and Vice Provost at Brandman University and also serves as the Founding President of the Board of Directors of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN). She has worked in higher education for over 20 years as a faculty member, interim dean, and assessment director. In 2016, she was named one of the "The Sixteen Most Innovative People in Higher Education" by Washington Monthly. Deborah J. Bushway currently serves as the Provost at Northwest Health Sciences University and as an educational consultant. She has served in a variety of roles prior to this, including Senior Advisor in the Office of the Undersecretary at the Department of Education in Washington, DC., interim associate Dean at the University of Wisconsin - Extension, and the Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Academic Innovation at Capella University. Charla S. Long is the Executive Director for the Competency-Based Education Network, a national consortium of higher education institutions and statewide systems seeking to design, develop, and scale new models of student learning. Additionally, she leads a consulting firm dedicated to helping institutions with competency-based learning. During 2015, she served as a consultant to Public Agenda on two significant CBE national landscape and field-building projects, funded by both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation. In this role, she provided insights, tools, and support to individuals and institutions seeking to advance competency-based education in the United States. These tools included the CBE Ecosystem Framework, the Shared Design Elements and Emerging Practices Model and Research Report, and the CBExchange conference where hundreds of institutions learned how to build high-quality CBE programs. Prior to this, Long was the founding dean of the College of Professional Studies at Lipscomb University and the creator of their national

Foreword by Amy Laitinen Introduction1. Institutional Culture 2. Program Design 3. Assessment Essentials and Strategies 4. The Learning Journey 5. Faculty and Staff Models and Considerations 6. Business Models, Processes, and Systems 7. Approval Considerations 8. Conclusion and Next Steps References About the Authors Index