Post -secondary competency-based education obviously has a lot of momentum, as we have reported on extensively in the past. But the Christensen Institute, a think tank co-founded by Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Jason Hwang to analyze issues in education and healthcare, argues that it’s much more than a trend.
Online competency-based education is the innovation that will shake up higher ed, they say. While most of us had our eye on the fascinating potential of MOOCs, the mixture of online ed and CBE programs has cohered into the much more significant force.
That thesis is laid out in a new ebook co-authored by Clayton Christensen and Senior Research Fellow, Michelle Weise. Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, available free for download at the institute’s website, argues that “online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers and the right business model.” Inexpensive and cost-effective online CBE programs that are “good enough” are releasing working adults and employers from the tyranny of the credit hour model and can respond to marketplace needs much more quickly than traditional higher ed programs.