National Center for Higher Education Management Systems

It seems appropriate to begin the first issue of 2019, the fourth year of the Journal of CBE, with an article that tracks and documents the business side of a competency-based education program. The team from Texas A & M University Commerce took a close look at their CBE program to understand how its financial structure actually operated. The authors—Carlos Rivers, Shonda Gibson, Erica Contreras, Tina Livingston, and Paula Hanson—come from appropriate units across the university, including academic affairs, budget & financial analyses, and business administration. The collective expertise they bring to this analysis is notable. Their approach can be useful to other higher education institutions as they begin and continue to develop their own CBE programs that must become sustainable. Sticking with the pragmatic realities of operating a CBE program, Naomi Rose Boyer and Kathy Bucklew share their research on the critical system design elements to electronically support students’ needs, academic requirements, and business functions. Their national survey results shed some light on how current higher education enterprise systems must evolve to adequately meet the needs of students in CBE programs and the institutions that offer them. The next article comes from Mark Lafave and Richard DeMont. They examined the challenges across Canada as the accredited programs in athletic therapy sought to enact one of the recommendations developed in 2013 by the Canadian Athletic Therapists’ Association. The authors sought to reveal the challenges faced by those trying to establish competencies for their programs. Lafave and DeMont used the information they gathered from the leaders of the program to develop four key themes that seem applicable to all beginning CBE programs. Finally, Emmanuel Paragus shares his research on competency-based education as it relates to a specific aspect of nursing education. He focuses on the “caring” competency for nurses in Manila, Philippines. He uses his outcomes to delineate “caring” into five different but seemingly related themes from which he builds a model of growth that can be of value to other nursing educators. As this Journal has chronicled over the last few years, there are multiple activities underway in the United States that will have an impact on policy that focuses on the core elements of CBE. As they continue to evolve, we will invite informed essays to help readers keep a perspective on what is emerging for the future acceptance of CBE practices.

Recently, Change Magazine celebrated its 50th year of publication. The 50th anniversary issue featured articles reflecting on the evolution of postsecondary education policy and practice from thoug...

As we wrap up the first year of the Journal for CBE, we are adding a new feature. Several readers have written letters to the editor to reflect on various articles published in 2016. We hope this feature will allow readers to react to articles on a regular basis. In addition, we have a couple of new articles to share with you. Danielle Camacho offers us a perspective on the research and history of Competency-Based Education, Personalized Learning, and incorporates Prior Learning Assessment. Her article is useful to set the context of what we still need to investigate as different elements of CBE continue to evolve. An examination of the development of effective practices was created by Lisa McIntyre-Hite. Her research report looked at three critical aspects of a good CBE program. She offers information from experts on the critical aspects of competency development, assessments, and learning resources. This research is a good first step into the types of further inquiry that Danielle Camacho recommends in the first article in this issue. Moving into its second year, the Journal of Competency-Based Education will continue to offer readers perspectives on state and federal policies tied to the growth and quality of CBE. It also will continue to publish research that helps the field mature.

Worldwide, economic and other factors are pressing institutions of higher education to assess student learning to insure that graduates acquire the skills and competencies demanded in the 21st century. This paper summarises the status of undergraduate student learning outcomes assessment at accredited colleges and universities in the United States. Three-quarters of institutions have established learning outcomes for all their students, a necessary first step in the assessment cycle. Most schools are using a combination of institution-level and programme-level assessments. Quality assurance requirements in the form of regional and specialised accreditation, along with an institutional commitment to improve, are the primary drivers of assessment. While there is considerable assessment activity going on, it does not appear that many institutions are using the results effectively to inform curricular modifications or otherwise to enhance teaching and learning. The paper closes with recommendations for various groups that can advance the assessment and institutional improvement agenda.

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the risk management process as applied to the community college.

Abstract This chapter surveys the published literature and Internet‐based resources on competencies. It provides a valuable touchstone for further research in this area.

This article examines how (and whether) particular types of institutional performance measures can be beneficially used in making resource allocation decisions. An analysis of different kinds of information‐driven funding approaches is first presented, which distinguishes various purposes of performance measures and proposes several policy trade‐offs that must be taken into consideration in designing information‐driven approaches to resource allocation. Among the former are pure accountability, informing policy, leveraging improvement and informing consumer choice. Among the latter are the ‘intended audience’ of the measures, whether funding is positively or negatively related to results, the level of prescription involved in the linkage between results and allocation, and the timing of allocation. Specific technical features of different kinds of performance measures are then examined, with particular attention paid to their varying appropriateness for informing funding decisions. A principal conclusion is that only easily verifiable ‘hard’ statistics should be used in classic ‘performance funding’ approaches, though data such as surveys and the use of ‘good practices’ by institutions may indirectly inform longer‐term resource investments on a periodic basis.