University of Maryland University College is committed to replacing all paid resources with open educational resources by 2016. At the same time both graduate and undergraduate programs are redesigning curricula to be competency based. The drive to competency-based education is driven by the need to personalize learning for our diverse students. UMUC students often transfer with multiple community college and other transcripts, prior learning such as noncollegiate instruction, external exams and certifications, and informal learning at the undergraduate level. These students need more than a traditional model that does not have enough variation to support the multiple starting points required. At the graduate level, competency based education builds on personalization of content for the purpose of achieving mastery that will translate to being better prepared professionally.
As our programs are redesigned starting this fall, the academic directors, instructional support services and academic support teams are collaborating on the alignment of resources and assessments to support competencies. There is also a much smaller effort to commence pilots using adaptive learning to help students be successful. The launch of a competency-based approach means that not only will additional content resources be available but the alignment and mapping of resources to assessments becomes more critical to support self-paced study. The university has put into place processes to align program outcomes and assessments to competencies. A team of academics and instructional support work together to define and identify the educational resources needed to best support outcomes at various levels that can be shared across programs.
The processes, progress and challenges with a competency-based redesign and a commitment to use OER will be discussed.
