Thursday, February 08, 2018

Competency-based job-oriented MOOC programs

Last update: Tuesday 2/6/18
By definition, job-oriented MOOC programs provide their students with the professional competence required to obtain and succeed in new jobs. Nevertheless, job-oriented programs do not adapt their curricula to accommodate the varying skills and aptitudes that their entering students bring to the table. In other words, there are no competency-based programs.

Job-oriented programs train students to enter emerging interdisciplinary fields, like data science, cannot assume that all new students have similar aptitudes and skills; therefore they should not assume that a "one size fits all" curriculum will be the most efficient use of each student's learning time.

 Most MOOCs in these programs seem to be adaptations of courses that might have been offered within traditional college programs. Their Websites offer no indications that their developers identified comprehensive sets of competencies that students would develop upon successful completion of all of the courses in the programs -- as would have been done by the developers of courses in competency-based education (CBE) programs

 But even if this information were available, most programs don't provide students with opportunities to opt out of courses they have already mastered. One size fits all. If a student doesn't take all eight, ten, or twelve courses in the program, the student won't earn the program's certificate.

 A workable solution to this problem was developed by traditional MBA programs a long time ago. MBA programs offer the same courses to all new students because they advise/require that students who lack certain prerequisites -- e.g., basic accounting, college algebra, computer literacy, etc -- must pass courses that cover these prerequisites before they start their first year in the program. Indeed, many schools of business offer courses that cover these prerequisites in summer programs. So one size fits all because MBA programs ensure that all entering students really are the same size.

Roy L Beasley, PhD
DLL Editor
on
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