Competency Based Education is UNE’s model for your learning environment in the Bachelor of Health Informatics program. Primarily, it is designed to allow you to progress through the schoolwork as efficiently as possible. Assignments are tied to “competencies,” what professionals in the field have decided are essential concepts and skills for success in the field. The completion of each assignment will take you closer to earning your degree; no assignment is unnecessary. Each of your assignments also contains within it a space for discussion with your instructor, so you can reach out for feedback about that assignment, and refer to previously provided feedback, very easily.
Probably the easiest way to describe competency based education is to illustrate how it is different from traditional course-based education. With that in mind, what is different about Competency Based Education compared to a traditional college classroom experience?
Competencies, not courses
Instead of courses, your CBE experience at UNE is broken down into all of the individual skills/concepts, or competencies, you need to master. Each competency is distinct, and you prove your mastery over them individually by completing assignments. Once you complete a set of competencies that are conceptually relevant to one another, you will progress on to another set of competencies. You can progress as quickly as you like.
Nothing less than mastery
Instead of passing with an average “C” grade or better, you must prove your mastery over all criteria of each competency, and while “mastery” may sound intimidating because you are just starting out, don’t worry: In regards to grades, “Mastery” translates to a B. You can also earn a “Distinguished” merit, which translates to an A.
Progress through revision and resubmission
CBE asks you to prove your mastery of each competency through completion of a problem-based project, but does not otherwise test you. The program is designed to allow you to learn through continuous improvement of your work until it proves your mastery of all criteria for a particular competency. You should expect to sometimes have to submit work for an assignment, receive feedback on that work, revise the work in response to the feedback, and then submit the work again…and sometimes you may have to do this multiple times. It’s fine to not always achieve mastery right out of the gate, and in fact, it’s a good sign! It means you have an area needing improvement. Use your instructor’s feedback to make those improvements and then submit again! You will be gratified to pass where you didn’t before, and then move on to new opportunities for improvement!
Competencies are distinct from one another
Let’s say you’re in a CBE program that is teaching you how to draw the human face. There may be a competency that teaches you how to draw the chin, a competency for the nose, another for the hair, etc. In that case, should the program include two separate competencies teaching you how to draw each eye? At UNE, we don’t think so. While traditional college courses may have you returning to the same concepts/skills several times throughout a semester, we isolate them as distinct competencies so you don’t have to prove mastery of the same one twice. In essence, we trust that once you can draw one eye, you can draw both.
Self-paced
Unlike courses, which have scheduled activities and assignments that all the students within the course follow together, CBE at UNE is designed to allow you to fit schoolwork in around your schedule. We’ve designed it this way so your lives don’t have to stop while you pursue your degree. However, the lack of a prescribed schedule means you have to supply your own. CBE is ideal for self-starters with clear goals and the drive to stick to those goals once set. You should expect to have to work, on average, 20 hours per competency. Plan ahead, too, for the occasional need to revise your work for resubmission. While the open-endedness of our CBE model allows you to do work on your own time, it also gives you the opportunity to let work sit too long.
