Developing Competency-Based Program Models in Three Community Colleges

In October 2012, under Round 2 of the TAACCCT grants program, DOL awarded a $12- million grant to a consortium led by Sinclair Community College (SCC) to fund a three-year project titled “Adapting and Adopting Competency-Based IT Instruction to Accelerate Learning for TAA-Eligible, Veterans, and Other Adult Learners.” Under the grant, lead college SCC and co-grantees Broward College (BC) and Austin Community College (ACC) are implementing programs in which they are “adapting and adopting” the Western Governors University (WGU) model of competency-based education (CBE) in four distinct information technology (IT) programs: (1) programming at ACC, (2) technical support at BC, and (3) networking and (4) software development at SCC. WGU is providing consulting and technical assistance to help the institutions address issues faced when adapting their programs to time-variant, competency- based models. As the consortium’s lead college, SCC contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to serve as the external evaluator for the consortium’s TAACCCT-funded project. This report, which provides the first analysis of program implementation by the consortium colleges, serves three primary purposes: (1) to document, at or near baseline, the program model that each of the participating colleges is implementing; (2) to report to the consortium and to DOL on the first year of program implementation under the grant; and (3) to inform potential replication by describing for external audiences how CBE models can be designed and launched in different institutional contexts. Appendix A explains the research methods Mathematica used to generate this report.