Beyond Knowledge Acquisition: What Competence-Based Education Has to Offer Learners
Competence-based education prepares students for a changing world by utilising a forward-facing, inter and cross-disciplinary focus; emphasising the process of learning - learning through doing, not only knowledge accumulation.
From climate change to vast health and wealth inequality, and the advent of sophisticated digital technologies, graduates are facing an array of evolving challenges that we hope they are prepared to face as a result of their time in higher education. This would surely be a marker of a successful learning experience and show that the best interests of society are aligned with learning outcomes that envisage a future that ‘could be’. This is where Competence Based Education (CBE) comes in.
To achieve this, CBE looks to instil and combine three core elements in learners:
Knowing: being able to demonstrate evidence-based knowledge
Being: developing a sense of awareness based on values, behaviours and skills
Acting: the ability to apply knowledge and behaviours to fulfil tasks within a specific context
With these three guiding objectives, CBE can enable learners to thoughtfully respond to the challenges they will face in the world after higher education, while also considering the impact of their actions in a wider context.
How Do We Deliver CBE?
The most intuitive way to deliver CBE is by mapping the teaching process with learning outcomes.
A good starting point for determining your desire learning outcomes is asking the question:
‘What values, skills, attitudes and behaviours would a thoughtful, ethical, compassionate and sustainability-focused professional in your subject area or discipline embody?’
It is essential that these learning outcomes are clear and explicit, with the aim of helping students envisage how they might be asked to think and behave in their chosen field. This might refer to a general set of professional values, or even something as specific as a personal goal or PSRB and industry requirement.
Below is an example of Level 6 competence learning outcomes for community sports development, which gives an idea of how competence-based education can be enabled.
| Category Descriptor | Learning Outcome |
|---|---|
| Autonomy and responsibility for actions | To act autonomously and make strategic decisions concerning, for example, session planning, marketing and advertising activities, how to ensure positive engagement by participants. Ensure personal actions and strategic decisions cause no harm to others and consider how such actions may make others react or behave. |
| Problem-solving and enquiry | Use demographics, quantitative and qualitative data, alongside other relevant information to profile local communities and inform planning for sports development initiatives. Identify potential roadblocks to progression and how they may be addressed. |
Ideally, learning outcomes should be integrated into teaching and assessment in a way that is as coherent as possible for teachers and learners alike. A good way to achieve this is for them to collaboratively map out where CBE is positioned in the course. This also helps students to track the development of the competences and allow them to personally reflect on their progress.
The reflective process that happens alongside CBE can also offer scope for students to weave their own personal experience into their work as part of evidencing their achievements. Designing assessments that include interactive portfolios, digital artefacts (for example, vlogs and podcasts reflecting on the process of learning) or conversational-style blogs and social media, can be a useful way to support this.
CBE in Practice: Generative Artificial Intelligence
An emerging social reality that CBE can help learners embrace with confidence and competence is the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Tools like ChatGPT are rapidly integrating themselves into society, and being able to use them ethically and effectively will quickly become a desired workplace skill. Confronted with this new phenomenon, embedding their use as a competency in CBE learning outcomes could be a useful way of formalizing how we use and view these tools.
Two challenges that this would be useful for addressing are setting the parameters for ethical use and levelling the playing field for students by ensuring equality of access for learners. QAA has offered guidance to institutions in devising their own approach to artificial intelligence but for integrating their use into teaching, CBE is a good place to start.
How to find out more
Hopefully this article has offered a taster of the principles and mechanisms that underpin CBE and shown what it might offer to students and wider society. If you would like to find out more about how curriculum for CBE can be designed, delivered, assessed and quality assured, then QAA has more resources to help you on this journey. Check out our Competence Based Education primer to get started.
About the authors
Ninian Wilson, PR, Press and Communications Officer for QAA
Ninian Wilson is a communications specialist with QAA. Before entering the higher education sector, he worked as a political journalist in Scotland. He studied law at the University of Aberdeen before obtaining a masters degree in international relations from the University of Edinburgh.
Amrita Narang, Quality Enhancement and Standards Specialist for QAA
Amrita Narang (SFHEA) is a quality enhancement and standards specialist with QAA. She has worked widely in the field of teaching, learning, and assessment in the UK, and India. In her present role she works with QAA members to develop and publish sector wide guidance and resources supporting quality enhancement (QAA Hallmarks of Success Playbooks, Creating Inclusive Subject Learning Communities, and Competence-Based Education Primer). She is currently pursuing her doctoral research in the field of curriculum inquiry and decoloniality.