The Power of Competency-Based Education With Dr. Amber Garrison Duncan 

Full Transcript

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Do you think learning is about more than just the diploma hanging on your wall? What if it’s really about the skills and experiences that you can actually put into action? I’m Dr. Cristi Ford, and today I’m joined by Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan, a passionate advocate for competency-based learning. In this episode, we’re diving into how this innovative approach to education, hiring, and training can help create a more equitable and impactful future for all of us.

Dr. Emma Zone :
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Each week, we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space. Sharpen your pencils. Class is about to begin. Amber, I’m so happy to have you here with me today.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Cristi, it’s great to see you and to be here. I am really excited for this conversation this morning.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Well, listen, let me tell you, first, I have to give you kudos for the C-BEN Exchange, or should I say CBExchange conference that you had last fall.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
We love convening the community and that is our one… We call it our love language. And our gift is bringing people together and helping them to just celebrate the hard work they’re doing and share ideas with each other. So thank you for joining us and for D2L for your amazing sponsorship of us since the beginning of CBExchange.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Absolutely.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
We’re so fortunate.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Well, let me just say to you, when I was at that conference last fall, first of all, seeing over 800 participants and the growth C-BEN community has seen was just remarkable and just made me realize we are at a precipice that this conversation, and many institutions and training organizations, has gone from this small inception to really being the way in which we need to be thinking about education going forward. So, I’m so excited that you’re joining us today.

Before I jump in and ask a couple questions, maybe for our listeners, let me just do a little bit of context setting. Amber is the Executive Vice President of Competency Based Education Network. You will hear us refer to it as C-BEN on this episode for short, competency-based education or CBE or mastery-based education, we’re going to talk a little bit about each of those kind of technologies and terminologies more specifically.

But what we’re finding is, and what I’m seeing is CBE is gaining momentum across higher education, that many may not fully understand what it is and how to action it, but what I am seeing on campuses is that it matters more so now than ever. And so, as before we dive into what you do at C-BEN, can you just maybe do a little context setting for the listeners around what competency of education is and maybe how it differs from the traditional models that see in higher education? And then maybe leave us with why is this a critical conversation for the future of learning and work development?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity again to be here and to share about this model. And I’m glad we’re starting with, what is it? Because everyone’s like, “Competency, competency, competency. Skills, skills, skills.”

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
[inaudible 00:03:09] a big thing too, now. And I think it’s important to level set and say, “What do we mean about that?”

Not just that there’s skills and competencies in a curriculum. This takes our teaching and learning model into the future, absolutely. And it’s based on what we know about how humans learn. And that’s actually how I found my way to CBE was just researching and studying. My dissertation is on general education and understanding how people were going through their gen ed and were they learning the things we were supposed to teach them, and could they do anything after graduation with those gen ed skills? And when I got into it, I was like, “Oh, this is not looking so good.”
But what I found was there’s a model that really looks at and starts with the end in mind for the full program. So a lot of times in higher ed as an assessment person, it was always, “Start with the end in mind.”

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
And then I’d be like, “Oh wait, we just did that for your course. We didn’t do that for the whole curriculum.”

So what we do in CBE is we start with the end in mind at the program level, we say, “What are those competencies? What do you have to know? What do you have to be able to do with what you know? How do you need to show up and perform that? And then, how many different places can you do that skill? Where can you take it? Can you work with different populations of people? If you’re a nurse, can you work in different types of settings and with different types of materials if you’re a welder? How do I make sure that you can know it, you can do it, and you can take it a lot of different places?”
And that’s what we design our programs to deliver on. Then we say, “Okay, not only is that, because pretty high quality already than what we’re doing, but how do we make it more learner-centric?”
And because we’ve already decided what those end goals are, we can create lots of flexibility for learners to move through that program at a pace that fits their lives, not our lives, their lives. And so, that’s also a big distinction point is you move through the program based on your ability to demonstrate mastery of that competency. So as soon as you demonstrate mastery, you move on. Or maybe you need just a little more time and so you slow down a little bit, or you say, “I’d like to learn one competency, or I’d like to learn ten this next subscription period.”

So again, learners can change and move through that as their life changes. And we all know, life is so busy. We got kids, we’ve got parents, we’ve got all these people that are in our lives. We’re trying to just make a buck. How do we make sure that if we’re trying to upskill or learn in that, that I have a program that is going to give me the skills I need and I know I’ll be able to perform at a flexible pace? And that’s what CBE does.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that approach. And as I’m listening to you provide this overview today, I hope we can also talk a little bit at some point in our conversation around the flavors of CBE.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Oh, yes.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
And maybe understanding through your work at C-BEN, high-level overview of what C-BEN does and why this work has been so critical and important now, and what you’re seeing in terms of institutions and training organizations really creating that tipping point around this work.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Sure. So C-BEN started about 10 years ago, so we’re pretty young, as a way to convene. There were seven institutions doing this saying, “There’s got to be another way to serve learners and there’s got to be another way to serve employers and improve learning at the same time.”
And so, those seven institutions came together and became what has now become… started C-BEN essentially, right? We had some great funding from Lumina Foundation and Gates Foundation. And essentially what they said to the seven institutions was, “Make it happen. Whatever you need to do, figure it out. We’ll support you. But also share across and make sure that you are helping others come along.”

And so, that has been at the core, again, of our community was a gathering, coming together and saying, “This is really hard to change this when we’re not using credit hour, but I figured this out. And guess what, this worked for this type of learner and blah, blah blah.”
So being able to really share that out. And that’s what we do at C-BEN, is we hold that community, we hold the table for that community and make sure that if you’re interested in this, you have a place to come learn. If you figured something out, let us know how you did it, because we want to help our colleagues get better and improve. And then at the crux, too, of our community has always been quality. So our quality framework for competency-based education is the only one in the U.S., the only one in maybe the world because we get a lot of phone calls from all kinds of places saying, “We found your framework.”

And so, being able to talk about quality and innovation and being able to help support as many organizations figure out, what does this model need to look like where I’m at? So we don’t come in and say, “There’s one way to do CBE.” We come in and say, “Here are the decisions you have to make and the type of quality you have to uphold. Go wherever your learners need you to go.”
That’s really what we come in and do. So in addition to holding that community, we do a lot of one-on-one time with partners, and building their programs at their campus and their training center with employers who are providing on-the-job training to help design programs that fit those populations’ needs.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s fantastic to hear. I think one of the things I really love about the work that you started, C-BEN has started 10 years ago, is really creating these communities of practice, giving people an opportunity to come together, to coalesce around some of these wicked challenges, to really figure out how do we solve this work?

And so, I think for me at D2L as a global organization, learning organization, and my role as chief learning officer, I’ve seen such a global adoption. You talked about global institutions and organizations finding you in the quality framework. I’ve seen such a global adoption of competency or mastery-based education for some time now. And I guess I just wonder as you look at the landscape, can we talk a little bit more about what is happening globally versus happening in North America? Are there things North America can glean from other parts of the globe to really catapult this work?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s so fun to look around and see who’s doing what. And I think to your point, a lot of this conversation about how do we make sure that people are getting what they need out of education, and some very interesting models coming up that we were learning from across the globe. So when I think about the Bologna Process and back when the European Union was saying, “How do we all agree on what should be in degrees? And then how do we define that with employers?”
And so, they went through that unifying process and then did a process called, Tuning, which was to say with the employers, “Tell us, what is mastery? What’s the level of mastery?” And then we’re going to go back and tune our curriculum up to that is what the words were used. Well, in the U.S., we don’t have that centralized infrastructure. We’re seeing it in Singapore. So Cristi, as you know-

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
… we hosted last year our first Asia-Pacific conference with Singapore Institute of Technology. And they have Singapore SkillsFuture which is pretty cool. Look it up. Because you can go online as a citizen, find out, here are all the skills programs I could take. You’ve got a little bank account with SkillsFuture, and guess what? The government’s put your [inaudible 00:11:08] money in there and you just go get the skills you need. So again, some of those more centralized pieces are in place that allow for, I think, the growth of CBE.

And a lot of that has been top-down. So countries saying, “Let’s go this direction. Here’s the skills you need and let’s go education and training.”

We don’t work that way in the U.S. We like a federated approach. So thinking about the ways that we help our organizations move forward, a lot of this has come from the ground up and it’s come up in particular industries, producing industry frameworks, like in cyber, manufacturing, green energy, places where they’re saying, “Here’s the in-demand skills that are needed on the job for these types of roles, and who can help us get there?”

And so it’s been this voluntary process of who’s willing to come to the table and get the work done. And that’s why I think this feels like an urgency now, is because we’re trying to figure out how we catch up with where economy is going already. Because we didn’t have the benefit of saying like, “Oh, we’ve been thinking about this for five years. We already updated our programs, look, we’re ready to go.”

We’re now saying, “Oh, my gosh, the economy’s changing. AI’s crashing into everything, changing everybody’s jobs. How do we make sure that we’re preparing people for the future?”
And saying, “The only way to probably do this is to sit down and think about those competencies and skills and make sure that people don’t just know things.”

We’ve done that for hundreds of years in higher ed. We are great at dissemination of knowledge and people do need to know things, but they got to be able to do something with it. And I tell people all the time, “No one’s going to pay you to sit around and just know things.”

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Right.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
That would be a great job.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
[inaudible 00:12:57] is knowledge.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
[inaudible 00:12:57] That’s nobody’s job. That’s nobody’s job. So how do we make sure that they can do something when they leave us? And that demand for quality is coming from our citizens, it’s coming from our government. And so, how do we restore public trust in education is by making sure we deliver on what people need to be successful in the world to go get that increase in wage, to make sure that our economy can run. And it’s by focusing on skills and getting people through the program as quickly as they can go through it, and making sure that we honor what they already bring to the table.

That’s something else in the model. It’s very easy to do credit for prior learning, because we already know, “Here’s what you have to know and be able to do. What are you already out there doing? All right, here’s what you have left to learn, keep going.”
Those are the things that people are asking for in our system, and we’ve got to move and pivot quickly. And so we are saying… You mentioned our conference group, about 200 people this year. We’re seeing more and more of the conversation, again, in our system shift to skills and thinking about what people have to be able to do. So that is this moment in time. But I think, again, we’re kind of catching up.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
I do think a lot of times, we will pivot in ways that other countries can’t though. So in the way that that top-down infrastructure works, those skills’ frameworks are created every five years. That alignment process happens every five years. What we’re learning right now is that’s too long. And so you can’t wait five years to do a program review. You can’t wait five years because the skills change in that amount of time-

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Dramatically.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
… dramatically. I just sat down with some math faculty who were with the hospital employing nurses saying, “Nurses don’t do that anymore. Machines do that.”
Dr. Cristi Ford:
Right, right.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
That’s just not in their wheelhouse. They don’t have to do that. And the faculty going, “Oh my gosh, how would I have known that?”

But that is a change that’s happened so fast. So we got to stay much closer in with our employer community and making sure that we are being ready to be responsive as quickly as the labor market’s changing. And that can’t be every five years. So I think we are going to figure out in the U.S., how do you do this at a speed that the economy is moving, in a way that some of our peers that we’ve learned from are going to have to figure out how to move faster?

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Man, you just have said so much great intel and information in that response there. And you make me remember, to your point, had the time last fall to be in Singapore at a Minister of Education’s Conference that was focused on skills, global skills. So you do point out that there is a different infrastructure in place in other parts of the globe that do allow for some of these conversations to happen.

I also agree with you, the advent of LLMs and the way in which that is changing different areas and different sectors of business, I think, is a really critical piece. And so, as I listened to you talk about this grassroots approach and thinking about employer engagement and these competency frameworks, I’m just wondering, as you’re looking and working with more educational institutions that are collaborating with employers, you had a great panel on at the conference that talked about some fantastic work happening in California. How do higher education institutions collaborate with employers to develop these competency frameworks? And then to your point, it can’t be every five years. How do we change this narrative around the cadence and the pacing of this that reflect the ever evolving needs of what we’re finding in the workforce?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Yeah, I think the biggest lesson I would say there is don’t go it alone. And a lot of times in higher ed, that’s what we start. We think, “We solve problems.”
We do. That’s what we do in higher ed. But don’t solve it alone. This is not a problem that I would say… Unless you’ve got one employer that only hires from you, there are other people trying to make sure that they’re preparing the workforce for those roles.

So I’ll go back to nursing since we already talked about nursing. In a community, if you think about even my small community here in Pensacola, Florida where it snowed last week, it’s crazy, but we have five hospitals in our area. And the volume of nurses that those hospitals need cannot be met by one institution of learning in this city. It takes a collection of us. So that’s where the collection saying, “How do I go to those employers? How do we go together and say, ‘We’re going to agree on the sets of competencies and skills that are necessary to be successful in your hospitals. You’re hiring all the same people, and my flavor of it is the same as your flavor of it at the end of the day. And so, let’s go together.'”

So that’s also what happened in that Central California [inaudible 00:17:56]. 11 community colleges worked with the farming community and worked with the manufacturers, people who are giving us our almonds, bringing us all our fruits, all of those things. And those 11 institutions created one common Ag Tech certificate to upskill farm workers for the new jobs that are coming because of AI and technology. And so, again, thinking about their goal in that project is to reach 4,000 learners. And again, saying, “We can’t do that by ourselves.” But 11 institutions working together, working for a common curriculum and a common set of competencies, we can do that together.

And the faculty built all that together and have rolled that out at their individual institutions, and they still teach and they’re still the arbiters of expertise. And if these students are getting to mastery… But again, the collective is how they did that, Cristi, and they have a continuous conversation with those employers.

In some examples, one of our big projects is in Alabama, we meet quarterly with the Alabama Committee on Credentialing and Career Pathways. And that committee has 14 industry councils that meet and look at, what are the in-demand jobs, what are those skills? Do we still have the right information that we’re feeding to education and employer training providers to our citizens? Because we want to make sure everybody has the right information about that demand sequence.

So again, that gives you a window into, it’s not every five years, sometimes it’s every year, sometimes it’s quarterly just to check. But again, I think those are very important ways to don’t go it alone. Either your state or your workforce region could be that incubator, your chamber of commerce in your city or your region could be that. But hook yourselves up with a partner who’s also trying to be a bridge between education and workforce. And there’s lots of people out there who can help you do that in addition to working with your peers to say-

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
… “We can do this together.”

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that. And when you say, “Don’t go it alone,” what I also hear you saying is, “You have to challenge the status quo around historically how institutions have engaged with employers, that it’s not about one institution, it’s about a consortium of institutions, about a consortium of employers.”

And so, to really be able to lift all sales around this work, it has to be a concerted effort where we all come together for the good of the community and the students or learners who are working in these industries to really make this change happen. And so, I think that’s, if nothing else, is a note that I will take away as I’m talking with institutions around how to really think from a macro level around some of this work.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Absolutely.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Don’t wait until the end to say, “I brought you some graduates.” I don’t know [inaudible 00:20:52] somebody.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s right.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
[inaudible 00:20:57] yeah.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Let me ask you, just move us on… Gosh, I have so many things I want to ask you. So let me just move us on a little bit in terms of some of the work I get to do here at D2L. As Chief Learning Officer, I can tell you that there are many institutions and organizations I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with who are working with D2L to empower their skills forward or competency-based approach. And so, I guess I want to understand what you’re seeing in ways of educational institutions effectively leveraging technology to address challenges in implementing CBE. And what innovations do you foresee playing a pivotal role?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Oh, good question. Well, I’ll start with… We love D2L so much, we put our own CompetentU professional development in your platform. So we would be remiss not to say, “Go check out CompetentU,” to get a real-life, learn your CBE skills and how to be a great CBE professional. And see Brightspace first hand. And the reason I start there, too, is because the LMS is the place where I think there’s a huge load for the technology platform to be able to enable all the different pastings and all the different content that a CBE program engages learners in, and to handle those performance-based assessments, and being able to really, again, be that flexible tool for all the different types of programs that might exist on a campus, let alone in our whole community, which you manage to do well.

So certainly, that LMS piece. But also, don’t forget your registrar, don’t forget your financial aid officer who also will need to interact with these tools and have new ways. We have a resource on our website called, Technology Architecture for CBE programs, that lays it all out and tells you-

Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s good.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
… the different tracks along with our enrollment management guide that tells those teams how they can be most helpful to the CBE program.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Fantastic.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
All the tech, all the tech.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
That makes sense. So if we move on to talking about moving from technology, talking to the skills validation piece, I want to talk a little bit about the Center for Skills by C-BEN. I understand that this is a partnership that has been really about reimagining skills validation. Can we talk a little bit more about what the partnership is about and why this work is so important in building the workforce of tomorrow?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Sure. Thank you. I’m so excited about this. We were just talking about, to move forward, you have to demonstrate mastery, what you know, what can you do, where can you go do that work, right?
So in CBE, we’ve been working for a long time on skills validation, and that means we have to use performance-based assessments. So, we are still early on maybe in a formative assessment using multiple choice tests to make sure that you’ve gotten that theory or you can recall some of those things. But then again, we don’t stop there. You have to go do that in the most authentic setting possible. That might actually be at work or that might be a simulation we’ve created or things like that. So that performance is what we’re looking at. Somebody has to do something, and we have to score that across faculty with common criteria and say, “Did this person reach those expectations of mastery?”

Again, we’ve been doing this for 10 years in CBE, and lo and behold, here comes the skills-based hiring conversation. But the employers are like, “We want to use skills. We need validated skills.”
And so we said, “You know what? We know a lot about some validation of skills.”
So how do we use assessment as a way to build trust and skills so that people can use them for further education and further employment? So how do we help the field reimagine what assessment needs to look like? It is this performance-based. How do we help all of us understand the types of evidence that people will need to have with them and carry with them as they’re looking to go get hired?

So you started off saying, “Is the diploma, and I’ve seen your diploma on your wall, mine are back here somewhere. “Is this diploma going to get me in the door?”
And what we’re learning is, it’s interesting, but the employer wants to say, “What’s in that? What did you do? And I want to see evidence of that.”
And so, we’re also seeing new learning and employment records that are a digital nature of your learning record that capture the definition of your skill, “What is that that we called that? What did you do to demonstrate that?”
There’s the performance evidence that you did, the actual assessment. Maybe the rubric is in there so that when I show up to the next place with it and I take that to the employer and say, “You should hire me.”

They see exactly why Dr. Ford at University of D2L verified that skill, validated that skill for me and can say, “That’s exactly what I want to hire somebody to do, come work for me.”
Or, they show up at their next education provider and want credit for prior learning. We now have the necessary evidence to make better decisions about what somebody knows and what they can do versus saying, “I’m comparing course content to course to content, and I’m assuming you got skills out of that.” We’re now saying, “How do I look at what you can actually do?”
And that’s where, again, that skills validation conversation comes into play is, “Who’s validating it? What did they use to validate it? And, can I see the evidence?”
And that’s where this partnership is made up of HR professionals, military, K-12, higher ed, anybody who’s thinking about, “How do I validate skills?” they’re part of this conversation, setting the tone in this direction for us, so we can all move together and make right decisions about assessment for the future.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love this work, because it allows us to double down. And this work is hard, right?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
It’s hard.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
We are talking about it very generally, that it is impactful work, it is meaningful and it’s necessary, but it is complicated work. And so, hearing that C-BEN is really focusing on skills validation, really helping institutions, working with HR, all of these parts of the ecosystem are really needing to work together to be able to make sure that this is valuable and how do we move this work forward?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
That’s right. That’s right.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
But from an employer’s perspective or side of things, as you talked about even with the center, can you tell us about that and what you’re hearing from employers? What do they need in this evidence to make this shift? Kind of make it tangible for those listening to understand how we need to start to differentiate this a little differently now than we have in the past?
Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Absolutely. I think early on in this conversation, all of us were… I’ve been guilty of it. We’re like, “Look. Look in our curriculum, we do this, and here’s this skill.”

But again, I didn’t assess it. I can’t tell you where they learned that. I can tell you they passed 70% of some of this. That’s where we found ourselves. Alabama was with a set of institutions and we were with employers and they started asking like, “Okay, I’d love to move to skills-based hiring, but where are the skills? Where’s this? Can I use this, because I need something that I can legally stand on to hire somebody, right? You’re asking me to move off of a degree or some other criteria, but I need a legally defensible criteria, and if you can’t give me any of this information or tell me what 70% or [inaudible 00:28:32], it is very hard for me to hire your learners.”

So that’s where, again, that close partnership with employers to say, “How do we build trust together in what someone knows and what they can do? And we agree on the skill, we agree on the level of mastery, we agree on what performance looks like, what does it look like to do that there? What evidence would you accept?”

And once we have that conversation, then we feel we can build something that then allows the learner-worker to show up to that employer asking exactly what. But we do have to push our employer friends to get clearer. As you can imagine, this is not what job descriptions look like.
I had an employer tell me that they had a rubric once, and I said, “Give me that rubric. If you’re using that for a performance review process, that is the clearest measure for any of us to understand what somebody’s doing on that job and how to prepare them to have the knowledge, the skills, and the context to come and be successful in your world.”

So that’s where, again, it’s getting much more into the weeds. We got to get much closer in with our employers and help each other define this together. I think, again, where we see a problem is if the employer’s over here trying to do this work, and you’re over here trying to do this work, you’re going to build bridges that just miss each other.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
And you’re going to have done all this hard skills work, and it’s not going to match up, and you’re going to get frustrated. So again, don’t go it alone. Do that work together.
And employers value you. Two things I would tell you they told us. They love seeing validated skills in that new learning and employment record, that green check mark, and when they see an institution of higher ed, they’ve said this, “I trust them. I trust those faculty to have done that. But before, I didn’t have a way to see that.”

So it really is building further trust in even what you’re doing and bringing more transparency to say, “We are good in higher ed. We just need to be a little more transparent, a little bit more on the doing side and we’ll get there.”

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Those actionable outcomes and really being able to demonstrate that evidence seems to be really key. Amber, I could talk to you all day. I think I’m going to try to wrap this up, but with a look back, but also a question to look forward. So I guess as I think about the question, the look back question, and all the wisdom that you have in helping educational institutions launch CBE and move these programs forward at such a rapid pace over the years, I guess I want to ask you, are there any calls to actions or lessons learned that you could share with other educational leaders who are looking to successfully implement a competency-based model? That’ll be my first question, you look back. And in the look forward, I want to understand, as you think about the future of CBE, how should institutions be preparing to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead?

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Whoo. Yes. Yes. We have a… Lessons learned, I think I typically say a couple things. One is, you already heard my don’t go it alone piece, which is good. The other thing I would say is a CBE model takes us out of our research-laden way of doing things in higher ed, where we’re going to experiment and we’re going to see what happens, and then we’ll change it, again, in five years. This needs to be an iteration moment, and I call it, Follow the iPhone, right? iPhone got a phone out into the market. What are we on now, we’re on like iPhone 16 or something like that?

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Right.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
You just got to get out there and get the data and start to move and change. So, don’t wait. Start and then iterate, iterate, iterate. Because if you wait, it’s going to be too late. And we know too many institutions are hurting from enrollments and other things and staying relevant. Get in the game now because if you wait too long, it’s going to be too late.

The other thing I would say to institutional leaders, in that same vein of pilot, don’t pilot in one program because your infrastructure for the institution has to shift completely, right? We say we’re going to break all the technology. Well, if everybody feels like we’re doing it for this one little boutique program, they’re not going to change, and they’re not going to support those faculty. We’ve seen that over and over.

So try three programs and as one gets out the door and running, add the next layer in and the next layer in. So institutions that make a commitment to the infrastructure and moving programs that direction have been much more successful. Yeah. So that would be my biggest guidance there.

And then for the future, what I do, I do hope and I do think we are coming to is, much more consensus and collaboration across institutions to solve for the issues we have today that, yes, we are unique missions and we’re going to serve unique populations of people. But again, in that nursing example, being able to come together…

We just finished a project with Kentucky, the state of Kentucky that’s looking at, “Can’t we… If Gen ed is the same, we should all be able to agree that this is what we’re supposed to be teaching learners. Can we go together?”

And so having… And it takes time again to be able to get in the weeds together, have that time together. But we have a lot more in common than we do not. And so being able to, again, turn back as a community of higher education to that state and say, “We’ve got this and we’ve got this together, and we’re going to scale. We can serve every person in this state.”

That is where I think we are headed. And again, protecting the unique missions and the unique faculty who will have that expertise in those places, but being able to collectively and more systemically say to our states, to our citizens, “We got you. We’re going to make it through this big economic change and time, and everybody’s going to get what they need out of learning.”

That’s where I think ultimately we’re going. And I hope we get to, because that’s, again, the way that I feel pretty strongly, we bring people back in the door. We serve people for what we… we all are mission-centric in our hearts to do. And so, let’s do it together.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love, love, love those predictions and lessons learned. And I will say, I am so impressed and proud of the work that you’re doing and C-BEN is doing. I absolutely believe that competency-based education is the future of how we reimagine this work in the future of work. And as we think about up-skilling and lifelong learning or lifelong life learning-

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Absolutely.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
… as Michelle Weise calls it, we all are a part of this ecosystem. So Dr. Amber Garrison Duncan, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Dr. Amber Garrison-Duncan:
Thank you, Dr. Ford.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Please, check out the work that Amber and the team at C-BEN are doing by visiting C-BEN.org. And while you’re there, please take a moment to sign up for their newsletter and learn more bout The Center for Skills by C-BEN.

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Dr. Emma Zone :
To learn more about our K through 20 and corporate solutions, visit D2L.com. Visit the Teaching and Learning studio for more material for educators by educators, including master classes, articles and interviews.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
And remember to hit that subscribe button. And please take a moment to rate, review and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school’s out.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• The Partnership For Skills Validation
• Cfs X C-ben: Partnership For Skills Validation Pdf
• C-ben (competency-based Education Network)
• All Learning Matters: How We Can Empower People Through A Comprehensive Recognition Of Their Skills