How competency-based education can fulfill the promise of educational technology

Abstract

Even with today’s sophisticated technologies, we usually are still exporting the classroom as if that is the ideal learning environment. Learning science has advanced a great deal in the past several centuries since the lecture became the most common form of ‘teaching’ at colleges and universities. There is a lot we know about how people learn, yet very few faculty members are learning experts. There is good evidence that adaptive or personalized learning environments help more students be successful, but these are hard to implement in traditional settings. The use of a competency-based education model can facilitate the use of these new learning environments to benefit students.