A relatively large and far-reaching group of educators, government officials and corporate leaders have helped shape the success of Western Governors University (WGU).

Born out of a brainstorming discussion in 1995 between governors from the Western Governors Association (www.westgov.org), WGU is the only regionally accredited and very first NCATE accredited higher education institution in the country that offers only distance-education, competency-based degree programs. Basically, WGU students earn their degrees by passing assessments, unlike traditional higher education where students must complete a specific number of credit hours to earn a degree.

From 500 Students to 8,000 Students in Record Time

WGU occupies the top three floors on an eight-story business office building located in Salt Lake City, Utah and has more than 390 off-site and on-site employees. WGU did not officially start until the summer of 1999, offering seven degree programs in business, information technology and education. By February 2003, WGU had 500 students. Today there are more than 8,000 students enrolled in 46 undergraduate and graduate competency-based degree programs, which includes four degrees offered through a new College of Health Professions that launched in Fall 2006.

What drives WGU’s relatively fast-moving success? The succinct and basic message that has remained the same throughout its short history is that WGU provides "an excellent physically and financially accessible education to an under-served population," said President Robert Mendenhall in a 2001 interview conducted by James L. Morrison, then editor of The Technology Source (see "Renaissance at Western Governors University: An Interview with Robert W. Mendenhall," The Technology Source Archives, May/June 2001, http://technologysource.org/article/renaissance_at_western_governors_university/).

A Different Kind of Higher Education/b>

This population consists primarily of adult learners with an average age of about 38. Tuition is charged as a flat rate and is relatively reasonable at $2,790 per 6-month term for all programs except the MBA and MSN degree programs, which are $3,250 per 6-month term. When many institutions raised their tuition rates in 2006 by as much as eight to 12 percent, WGU did not.

As noted on its website, "WGU treats all students as full-time students and charges tuition at a flat rate regardless of the number of competency units attempted or completed by the student. The standard term is based upon a full-time enrollment of at least 12 competency units for undergraduates and 8 competency units for graduates. Students who complete more or fewer units are charged the same tuition rate."

The rapidly growing enrollment numbers and reasonable cost, however, are not as important as the competency-based education model that has been successfully implemented by WGU, notes Mendenhall in a June 2007 interview with Educational Pathways. "It’s not an end goal (enrollment growth); it’s more of a means to an end for expanding access and trying to provide a high-quality, low-cost education using a different model," he explains. "The bigger story behind the growth is this model. It is attractive to adult students, because they don’t have to take a bunch of courses in subjects they already know; they can focus on what they need to know."

Recent education graduate Emily Tomkins is a good example. At 29, her circumstances are typical of many adult learners who are seeking a fast track to a career change. For Tomkins, her new career path, catalyzed and obtained through WGU, entailed earning teacher certification and just recently getting hired in a full-time position as a first-grade elementary school teacher in a South Dakota school district near her home in Sioux Falls. Her mission was accomplished in 16 months. "I am really grateful to WGU because they provided me with an avenue by which I could get that initial certification and really pursue my life’s passion when there was no other option for me to do so," Tomkins says.

Says Mendenhall: "If you start with what we know about learning, generally, and adult learning, specifically, we know that learners bring to the learning experience different backgrounds, different levels of knowledge and skill. Secondly, we know that people learn at different rates. So, why would we design a higher education system that says, ‘guess what, you all have to take the same number of credit hours; you must take the same required prerequisite courses, and the same required major courses, and you get a few electives? And, oh, by the way, the length of each course will be four months.’"

Tomkins had earned a dual-major bachelor of arts degree in music and anthropology in 2001 from Ohio State University. She found work as an archeologist in Wisconsin, but her life changed direction when her husband landed a dream job as principle bassoonist for the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. Now, with a move to Sioux Falls, Tomkins began a totally new and different career path. After a part-time gig, she was promoted to music manager for a local Barnes and Noble store. Previous to this position, she did some substitute teaching for about one year in a school district near Sioux Falls.

"I was moving up and doing the whole corporate thing," Tomkins says. "Barnes and Noble is certainly not a bad company to work for, but I felt that I missed the interaction I had with children, (as a substitute teacher) and so I decided that I should go back and teach, since that was where my passion was."

Tomkins enrolled in the Post-Baccalaureate Teacher Preparation Program (K-8), which qualified her to become licensed as an elementary school teacher. In short, this particular program was just what Tomkins was looking for. As noted on the WGU website, it’s "the fastest way to become an elementary school teacher if you already have a bachelor’s degree. The program trains you to become a highly-qualified teacher and includes supervised practice teaching in an actual classroom setting."

About a year prior to making this transition, Tomkins and her husband had a baby boy. "Things weren’t so simple any more," she says. "I could not go to a traditional school. We have a mortgage and a child. I could not tell my husband, ‘well, I’m just going to throw my career away and go back to school for three or four years.’ So, I did a lot of research into alternative ways to get that initial teacher’s certification, and WGU turned out to be the best program."

The first course on Tomkins’s slate, which is required by all WGU students, was a four-week, online orientation course titled "Education Without Boundaries." The course prepares students for how to learn online and how to begin the entire process of a competency-based education.

Each student is assigned a faculty mentor and a progress manager who communicate with him/her regularly on an "Academic Action Plan" from beginning to end of program and act as an instructional resource, advisor, and always-available guide on the side. Students work their way through domains and sub-domains that require them to demonstrate their competencies through a series of carefully designed assessments. Students can accelerate their degree completion depending on the competencies they may already have while juggling the demands of their personal and work lives.

Additionally, while moving through domains and assessments, students have access to online learning communities where they can interact asynchronously in discussion forums with fellow students who are going through the same learning processes and assessments. The faculty mentors double as facilitators, as well as answer pertinent questions, inside these online learning communities.

A WGU learning resources division provides students with access to the WGU Central Library, which is operated by the University of New Mexico General Library, as well as access to a wide range of additional learning resources, including fully online courses from other higher education institutions, e-learning modules from commercial vendors, textbooks and other learning materials.

"You do a lot of reading and a lot of research; you really have to prove that you understand the specific learning goals that the school has laid out," says Tomkins. "It is a demanding program. I firmly believe that my experiences at WGU were just as rigorous as any class that I ever took at Ohio State."

The building of valid, academically demanding degree programs at WGU starts with Program Councils, says Mendenhall. "We convene panels; we call them Program Councils. These are outside experts from both industry and academia who define what they would expect a graduate to know and be able to do."

InIn addition, a separate Assessment Council, made up of national experts in gauging and assessing learning in higher education, works with WGU to come up with the most appropriate ways to measure what a graduate must know and be able to do. "We have a whole battery of assessments that include objective tests, performance tests, portfolios and projects," says Mendenall. For example, in the Teachers College, all students seeking initial licensure must experience 12 weeks of live student teaching in the classroom under the observation of a clinical supervisor who uses a rubric, vetted by the Assessment Council, that covers eight separate observations related to specific performance tasks.

Overall, WGU continues to figure out how to effectively implement and adapt to a dramatically different approach to education, says Patrick Partridge, vice president of marketing. "We think we have begun to prove the validity of competency-based education, at least as we do it. We think the marketplace is accepting of it and that our graduates appreciate the relevancy and currency of our academic content."

Partridge further explains that the competency-based approach fits the needs and wants of a relatively small segment of prospective students who have a "certain higher level of self sufficiency. We don’t need to make WGU’s version of competency-based education the be-all and end-all of education, or online education. It is simply a somewhat evolved model that we think is really appropriate for a lot of adult education students. We are adaptable ourselves to learning, as time goes on, how to make it better and make it even more of a fit for more people."