How is a Competency-Based Curriculum Organized?

Curricula are structured differently in competency-based education (CBE) programs. CBE’s focus on facilitating learner agency to achieve mastery of competencies on their own timeline opens the door to a different approach for how curricula can and should look.

But, of all the elements in the rich tapestry of CBE’s pedagogical tenets, making structural changes to curriculum is one of the most difficult for colleges and universities to implement. This is largely due to deeply entrenched governance systems that by their design perpetuate legacy-approved structures for organizing a curriculum. The underlying structural assumptions of the modern baccalaureate degree, for instance, were created over a century ago. Changing the structure of anything with that kind of legacy is hard!

As a result, too many colleges adopt CBE’s pedagogical tenets (e.g. self-pacing, individual instruction, requiring mastery) but do not make meaningful structural changes to their curriculum. This might include:

• Just renaming existing learning outcomes and calling them competencies
• Continuing to use the 3-credit hour course as the default organizational schema even if that’s not aligned to a competency’s needs
• Perpetuating disciplinary silos among faculty (especially in the general education core)
• Leaving out employers from the curricular conversations, or involving them “in name only”
• Viewing CBE as something done course-by-course instead of as a cohesive programmatic effort
• Creating an overly byzantine curriculum map that “loses the forest for the trees”

In order to make meaningful change in curriculum we have to start by understanding how a CBE curriculum is organized. This is step one. Think of this as learning the blueprint of a house before you begin building it. I won’t be diving into the process of curriculum development in this article (that’s coming in the future!), but rather describing the key attributes and organizational schema of a CBE curriculum.

Understanding the Key Attributes of a CBE Curriculum

Below are six attributes of a CBE curriculum that inform how it is structured and designed.

1) Focus on competencies, not courses.

The beating heart of a CBE curriculum are the competencies themselves. Competencies are statements that describe what someone knows and can do in an applied context. Courses (if used) are simply an organizational unit to teach and assess a group of related competencies. The central purpose of CBE is mastering competencies, not “passing” classes.

2) Design at the program level, not course by course.

Faculty work as a team with their industry partners to establish the full set of competencies that define the entire credential. They do not segment the competencies as what is included in “your course” or “my course” but rather as a cohesive, coordinated program of study with a uniform set of competencies needed by a holder of that credential. This is represented by the C-BEN Quality Framework Element #3, “Coherent Program and Curriculum Design.”

3) Remove electives.

Although specializations, program tracks, and stackable certificates are encouraged in a CBE curriculum, the traditional concept of an open elective is discouraged. Since the competencies are established at the credential level (and with workforce partners at the table), it becomes a cohesive curriculum with a seamless user experience. If specific outcomes are desired in a program, then all learners must achieve that outcome.

4) Center the curricula on performance and practice.

CBE’s emphasis on behavioral application in a curriculum is not intended to suggest that knowledge is not important. Rather, the focus is that knowledge is in service of performance, not knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Thus, CBE curricula shift away from rote memorization and fact recall of disciplinary content towards an ethos of applied behavior. We often quip at C-BEN that ‘employers don’t pay you to sit there and know things, they expect you to do something with that knowledge.’ Resultingly, the assessment paradigm must likewise change, emphasizing observable performance-based assessment instruments.

5) Leverage interdisciplinary approaches.

By focusing on performance of the competency and not on individual content silos, CBE curricula tend to naturally lend themselves well with interdisciplinary approaches to curriculum design. Competencies become interwoven across a curriculum, continually reinforced and expanded upon.

6) Modularize curriculum.

CBE curricula tend to use modularization as a way to define, teach, and assess discrete competencies. A major benefit of a modularized curriculum is the ability to package it in interesting and discrete ways (e.g. stackable certificates, microcredentials). It also enables the successful awarding of prior learning credit in an easier fashion, by allowing discrete competencies to be satisfied based on submitted evidence of their performance.

Given these six broad attributes of CBE curricula, let’s turn now to the blueprint of a CBE curriculum.

CBE Curricular Architecture in Action

The conceptual framework that a CBE curriculum uses is organized into four levels: 1) Program outcomes, 2) domains, 3) competencies, and 4) performance indicators. Each successive level becomes more granular and is written in service of describing how to achieve the preceding level.

A more traditional curriculum map in its most basic form is structured on three levels: 1) program outcomes, 2) courses, and 3) course learning outcomes.

Let’s take a look at those 4 levels of a CBE curriculum map in closer detail:

1) At the top, we have program outcomes. Usually required by your accreditor, this is a small number of broad statements that describe the cumulative learning impact of the entire credential. These typically don’t look differently in a CBE program than perhaps you’re used to.

2) Domains, or competency areas, are broad thematic categories that provide organizational clarity to your curriculum. Without domains, a credential can look like a list of random competencies. These conceptual categories form the general schema of how the curriculum will be operationalized. These may not be necessary for very small programs (e.g., certificates). The below example is a bit older, but a clean and easy to understand visual of the relationship between domains and competencies.

3) Next up we have the competencies themselves. The heart and soul of the CBE curricula, the central purpose of CBE is mastery or attainment of the competencies. The number of competencies varies, as institutions across the country adopt different standards for the right size of a competency. Remember, the anchor point of a CBE curriculum are the competencies. CBE programs require you to discretely track and measure each learner’s mastery of each competency.

4) Beneath each competency is a set of performance indicators. If the competencies are the heart of a CBE curriculum, then the performance indicators are the engine that powers it all. They spell out the behavioral criteria of the competency, providing clarity as to the conditions of performance that indicates the successful performance of the competency.

What’s Missing from that Hierarchy?

You’ll notice a few key concepts that are absent from our curricular hierarchy.

First, courses are not a concept notated here. Remember, the point of a CBE curriculum is to facilitate learner mastery of the competencies; not the passing of courses. Courses – if used – become units that bundle several related competencies together. For instance, Marketing 101 might be a course that bundles 2 or 3 foundational marketing competencies together.

Now, it is worth noting that nearly every CBE program in the country still uses courses in some form or another. But, following the CBE curriculum design process, courses are one of the very last things you will map to or establish and they exist as a “house” for your competencies. Build your entire program’s competencies first, then organize them into courses.

Candidly, I find that when programs start with a list of courses and then try to determine competencies for those courses they are being more responsive to an academic legacy than they are to actual workforce needs. As a result, I council to lead with competencies: it really does produce a different curriculum.

Second, you’ll also notice learning outcomes are absent from this list. In my view, well-written performance indicators replace the need for separate learning outcomes. What is the intended learning outcome of a CBE program? Mastery of the competencies. How do we know when someone has mastered a competency? When they’ve demonstrated all the performance indicators of it to the level expected.

Too often, I see institutions get bogged down in what I call “curricular bureaucracy.” They find themselves with program outcomes, domains, competencies, sub-competencies, course learning outcomes, performance indicators, module learning outcomes, and lesson learning outcomes . . . throw ILOs and GEOs into the mix and before you know it the curriculum becomes unwieldy.

My advice? Keep it simple. Writing more layers of outcomes doesn’t automatically improve instruction or learning. Clear program outcomes, organizing domains, efficient competencies, and a precise set of performance criteria for those competencies is more than enough to have a well-functioning CBE program.

What Comes Next?

As this article was just focused on how CBE curricula are organized, in a future post, I’ll walk through the process of building a CBE curriculum (which, as you can imagine, is a different approach!). If you’re eager to dive deep into that now, check out CompetentU, C-BEN’s professional development platform with training on CBE curriculum development.

In the meantime, reach out! C-BEN offers best-in-class, full service curriculum design and development services. Reach out; we’d love to help. Email ryan@c-ben.org

Dr. Laurie Dodge served as a fact checker on this post. Generative AI was not used in the creation of this article.