Capella Faculty Trainer Paul Hardt sums it up this way: "We are a collection of professional schools," he says. "We don’t have a department of physics; we don’t have a department of chemistry; we don’t have an English department. All five of our schools are focused on preparing professionals for work, and the fact of the matter is that each of these five schools are working in worlds where competencies are king of the realm. And if you are not doing it [embedding competency-based strategies inside courses], you are really doing a disservice to your learners."

But just what is competency-based learning? The short definition is that courses have some sort of emphasis on "practical knowledge that you can apply to your life or work immediately," says Don Smithmier, vice president of e-learning and Web strategies.

Stan Trollip, director of e-learning, research and development, notes that competency-based learning "is a continuum; at one end of the spectrum, you can put some very minor changes into a course and call it competency-based; and at the other end of the spectrum, one can do an exhaustive analysis of the target audiences, and through that, in sort of a trickle-down effect, come up with a course in which every component can be regarded as competency-based. There is a huge disparity between these two [sides of the continuum] in terms of the time and cost of getting there. Capella is somewhere in the middle."

"So, in developing a course, the first goal is to make sure we have identified what the competencies are, and those serve as the guiding outline of the course exercises, activities and instruction," says Smithmier.

What Trollip calls the "softer yet extremely important" elements of a course, which are typically made clear in course descriptions stating objectives and goals in terms of facilitating knowledge, comprehension and appreciation, are still evident inside a competency-based learning environment. It’s just that there are specific competency-based elements added into the structure and strategy of the course that show what a learner can actually do with such knowledge, comprehension and appreciation.

In preparation for converting all of Capella’s courses to the competency-based model, Trollip explains that at both the course level and the unit level (equal to one week of study and assignments inside a course), Capella’s content developers, which includes faculty content experts, are identifying learner expectations that are stated, for the most part, in terms of observable acts or products. Some examples of such acts or products include: an accounting course where a learner clearly demonstrates his or her ability to post a double-entry bookkeeping ledger that can act as a visible manifestation of knowledge gained; an instructional design course where a learner clearly outlines a teaching approach from a behaviorist perspective, cognitive perspective and constructivist perspective; or a Web developer course where the learner is required to construct a Web site that leverages back-end databases and JAVA technology.

Trollip adds that, overall, Capella’s competency-based approach to learning and teaching "fits into a broader philosophical approach that adults really do prefer to have their learning be very relevant to their jobs." Additionally, he says that "Capella is very much a scholar/practitioner institution. We try to emphasize the application of theory, rather than theory by itself. We certainly talk about theory, but we are much more interested in knowing that our learners can take that theory and turn it into something that is useful, beneficial and relevant to whatever it is that they are doing."

"Part of the competency-based approach is that we articulate a set of grading rubrics around all the things that the learner has to do," says Trollip. "So, once you have specified a competency, or something that someone has to do, it becomes much easier to build a grading rubric around it. In an ideal situation the rubric would be well enough constructed so that the learners could assess themselves."

As courses are developed, meaning a syllabus is defined and the unit structures and activities are created, a grading rubric is also built, adds Smithmier. "The grading rubric is a defined structure for the instructor to use to say how are you going to evaluate the learner in the course. Rather than it being a largely qualitative, subjective grading process, we are really trying to define it. An ‘A’ in this exercise is defined as this. . . the learner is displaying that they understand this concept and demonstrating that they know how to do this. . . and a ‘B’ is this and a ‘C’ is this, and so on. It is a strategy for becoming a lot more consistent in how we evaluate learners."