How do CBE Programs Determine Competency to Credit Equivalency?

One of the questions I get most frequently from clients and C-BEN community members alike is how many competencies should our program have? This question takes many forms, though is usually framed as “how many credits is this competency equivalent to?”

My goal is to briefly explore this challenging (and contentious!) topic and provide guidance on the most common approaches in the field.

Up First: Why Framing Competencies in Relation to Credits is the Wrong Position to Start With

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the credit hour is a fundamentally flawed and artificial construct with no relationship to learning. It was created in the early 1900s as a way to determine faculty eligibility for Andrew Carnegie’s pension fund and to standardize college admissions requirements. It was never intended to be a reflection of learning: it is a measure of inputs (hours in) not outputs (learning achieved).

For decades, major organizations (including the Carnegie Foundation itself) have debated the merits of an alternative system to the credit hour. But the truth that thought leaders keep arriving back to is the credit hour is the bedrock of our entire educational system (not to mention enshrined in federal law through Title IV of the 1965 Higher Education Act). Even the most innovative direct assessment CBE programs must still map back to the credit hour. I’m reformist through and through, but even I’ll name the practical reality that the credit hour system is not going anywhere anytime soon.

However, I counsel institutions to begin their CBE curriculum development process not with a question of credit equivalency. Instead, begin with a question of “what competencies are needed by your graduates to be successful in the associated labor market?”

Otherwise, if we start by thinking about how many competencies need to fit into our existing credits, we are throttling our potential impact before we even begin. Employers do not think in credits, they think in competencies.

Right-Sizing Competencies: The Goldilocks Test

When I lead faculty workshops, I don’t lead by coaching on a ratio because I don’t hold the concept of a traditional 3-credit course as sacred. Though 3-credit courses are standard, it is an open secret in our industry that the amount of learning, content, rigor, and time necessary varies substantially across courses, faculty, and disciplines despite being allocated the same credits. Students know, we know it, and yet we still act as if the credit hour is a great equalizer of learning.

Instead, I help faculty and their employer partners identify the necessary competencies that define a field of study. For instance, that might look like “to be an accountant, you need these 14 competencies,” or “graduate-level trained teachers must master these 26 competencies,” and so-on-and-so-forth.

Competencies describe what someone knows and can do in an applied context. A competency is not a task. If “cooking a meal” were to be a competency, then “preheat the oven to 425 degrees” is a task. There is an art and science to writing an effective competency that is neither too broad nor too narrow.

Once the set of competencies (and their performance indicators) are created , I recommend crosswalking them against the credit hour standards that an institution has on file with its accreditor. In most cases, this conforms to federal standards for learner workload of 45 equivalent hours of effort per 1 credit hour. It is also true that competency-based programs have the ability to define credit hour equivalency not based on seat time proxy alone, but in equivalency in the level, amount, and rigor of learning, as well as any other accreditor approved methodological considerations.

So I ask, “how many equivalent hours of effort does one expect a typical learner reasonably needs to master that competency as written?” Now of course, it’s competency-based education: the ability for learners to accelerate or decelerate is the defining feature of the whole pedagogy. The easiest way in curriculum design to determine credit to competency allocation is to build around the median equivalency of time effort needed to achieve mastery, while factoring in any non-quantitative metrics of equivalency (noted earlier, as approved by your accreditor).

This typically results in a curriculum map with competencies of varying weight – some are 1 credit, some are 3, some are 1.5. It is time now to balance the curriculum. Competencies that are too large are broken down into smaller ones (e.g. “Communications” might now become “Oral Comms” and “Written Comms”), and competencies that are too small are bundled up into a larger one. Faculty add up all the weights and see how authentically close they are to the magic number of credits needed for the credential (e.g. 120 credits for a bachelor’s degree), and make adjustments as needed in accordance with their governance bodies’ guidance.

Fixed Approaches to Equivalency: Balancing Practical Use with Aspirational Goals

All that said, as much as I aspire to a vision of curriculum development unburdened by credits, in practice, most institutions use a fixed ratio instead of the more organic approach I described above. This helps avoid situations where one course has 30 competencies and another has 3, ensure consistency in transfer by making competency transcription easier, and defines a unifying vision for what is meant by a competency at an institutional level.

This typically takes one of two forms:

1. Fixed Credits to Competencies. An institution (or state system) creates a fixed standard of how many competencies should be paired with a credit hour. Most often, I see a 1:1 (1 competency = 1 credit hour), although other ratios are common.
2. Institutionally Specified Range. An institution creates a fixed equivalency range, within which faculty have flexibility in defining competencies but cannot extend below/beyond. For example, this might be expressed in the form of “3-6 competencies per traditional 3 credit class.”

It is important to note in the above examples that it is equally common to see “large” competencies (e.g. 1 competency = 3 credits) as well as more narrowly tailored competencies (e.g. 1 competency = 1 credit). Your institution – in partnership with industry – will define the right “size” of a competency.

There are pros and cons to using a ratio or a fixed range approach compared to organically arriving at the number of competencies in a credential. Perhaps the biggest benefit here is it can guard against too-narrowly (or too-broadly) defined competencies and provide institutional consistency in its approach. Fixed ratios can also help facilitate consistency for learners transferring credits in and out of a program. But this approach can also artificially constrain the competencies from being truly responsive to what the workforce asked for. If employers say they have 5 key competencies they want, but your institutional ratio requires you to have 10, you’re now splitting hairs on what your employer partners needed.

So what? Now what?

Using institutionally defined ratios or ranges helps ensure a consistent curriculum design ethos across your CBE portfolio, and has real benefits especially with respect to transfer consistency and transcription.

That said, starting with a pre-ordained number in mind for how many competencies your program needs can dampen the authenticity of your competency set with respect to what industry needs. If tenable, I coach institutions to start with an organic set that emerges from your CBE curriculum development process, and then weight based on actual crosswalked equivalency. This helps ensure the curriculum is responsive to current needs instead of focused on the primacy of our historical academic structures.

Regardless of the approach you take, remember these key tenets:

1. Competency-based education requires mastery of competencies, not passing of courses. If a single course has 6 competencies, learners have to master all 6.
2. Less is more. I like to think of a credential’s competencies as a list a learner can reasonably articulate to an employer if asked. If someone completes a 120 credit bachelor’s degree with 300 competencies (I’ve seen it!), that doesn’t really help advance our cause of transparency in any meaningful way.
3. Always connect to labor market information. In C-BEN’s Quality Framework for Competency-Based Education (the only quality standard for CBE), a key marker of competency quality is its accurate depiction of workforce needs.

 

Looking for guidance on how to do this work? Reach out!

This is a complex curriculum development approach that intersects with even more complex regulatory considerations. Institutions submitting CBE substantive change applications with their accreditor must explain and defend their equivalency methodology. Our team has walked the walk and built competency-based curricula across disciplines and institutional types. To start, email ryan@c-ben.org.

Dr. Laurie Dodge served as a fact checker on this post.