Now that you’ve thought about how you’ll structure your CBE program, let’s discuss how to develop a CBE program or course. There isn’t a universal process for developing a CBE program. Designing for CBE largely depends on your team’s capabilities, preferences, and familiarity with the CBE approach you’re using. In this section, we’ll use the WGU Labs design process as a springboard to discuss one way to develop a CBE program or course.
Designing a CBE Program in Five Steps
WGU Labs learning experience designers typically follow a five-step approach to designing CBE programs and courses. The table below outlines this approach.
Now, let’s break down these steps further to understand the thought processes and reasoning behind them.
Breaking Down the Labs CBE Design Process
STEP ONE: Identify Industry Competencies
Because CBE focuses on academic AND industry requirements, learning outcomes and industry competencies provide a CBE program or course’s foundations. Therefore, many designers will use a backward design process to identify competencies, outcomes, and course objectives before designing anything else.
What is Backward Design?
Traditionally, faculty start the design process with a topic related to the course’s subject matter. Next, they design learning activities and assessments based on that topic and then create course objectives and learning outcomes. Backward design flips this process. Designers identify a course’s objectives and outcomes and then develop the final exam, supplementary learning activities, and assignments around those objectives. This process ensures that the course adequately addresses its overall goals and that students obtain the skills and knowledge the program intends.
How do designers identify industry competencies?
Many industries have organizations that determine quality standards for education programs. For example, computer programming courses often align with CompTia standards, and early childhood programs align with state and federal regulations. These organizations create competencies and make them public and accessible for institutions and programs to follow. Designers and/or administrators will locate these competencies and use them as the foundation for their program or course’s industry requirements.
STEP TWO: Review Program Outcomes, Course Objectives
If you’re redesigning a program or course, administrators and faculty partner with designers to review existing program outcomes and course objectives to determine if these statements are still relevant and will help students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their industry. You may need to rewrite your program outcomes and objectives to align with CBE pedagogy, philosophy, and goals.
STEP THREE: Map Program/Course Content to Competencies
After identifying competencies, program outcomes, and course objectives, designers typically engage in a curriculum mapping process. Curriculum Mapping is a systematic process where a course designer reviews the curriculum and matches the competencies with the appropriate course or program content, noting which portions of the curriculum need to be revised, removed, added, or rearranged to better address each competency.
STEP FOUR: Course Design: Design the Final Assessment
After competency mapping, designers start developing courses. Remember that CBE asks students to demonstrate mastery of industry-specific knowledge and skills. Therefore, assessments are essential to CBE; they allow students to show what they can do. When designers follow a backward design process, they create the final exam or summative assessment right after identifying competencies, objectives, and outcomes because the assessment is the heart of the course.
CBE assessments focus on practical skills and knowledge application. Often, they utilize authentic learning (i.e., what you do in the classroom directly translates to what you’ll do on the job) in the form of project-based learning, scenarios, case studies, presentations, simulations, etc. — anything to get the students actively involved in the learning process and apply their knowledge to realistic situations.
*If you're using a direct assessment approach, your design process will likely end here.
STEP FIVE: Align Course Activities & Assignments to the Assessment
If you’re using a course/credit-based CBE approach, you’ll likely have assignments and learning activities just like in a traditional program or course. Every learning experience within a course or program should directly relate to the final assessment. Learning activities and assignments will help students develop the skills needed to complete the assessment tasks; anything you ask the students to do in an assessment, they should have already done in the course. Activities and assignments will also utilize authentic learning principles, but you can also leverage formative assessments, like low-stakes quizzes, to help students learn and fill in any knowledge gaps.
Conclusion
The CBE design process puts competencies at the forefront. As outlined in our post on structuring your CBE program, competencies determine how your program will run. If you’re taking a direct assessment approach, the way you design your program may look different from the traditional credit-based approach many of us are used to. So, what does this mean for your program’s accreditation status and financial aid? Find out in our next post!
