In India, students would have gone through about 16 years of education between school and college when they graduate. So much of investment in terms of money, time and efforts get wasted because the students go through rote learning without a clear purpose of why they are learning, what they are learning and how such learning will get used in their life and career.
There are two choices for learning, either ‘Do and Learn’ or ‘Learn and Do’, while building one’s career. In India, a truck cleaner becoming its driver is a good example of ‘Do and Learn’ whereas becoming a pilot is a good example for ‘Learn and Do’. There is a significant difference in the way they acquire the skills. Safety records of the aviation industry compared with road transportation speaks for itself.
The cleaner learns by observing the driver for few years and in the process learns all the good and bad habits in the process of becoming a driver. This leads to poor quality of driving resulting in one serious accident per minute on Indian roads and 16 deaths per hour.
On the other hand, one who wishes to become a pilot joins a flying school and obtains a private or commercial pilot licence and become a co-pilot on further approval by the Directorate of Civil Aviation. Hence, the highest safety record exists in Civil aviation with 2-3 accidents and 345 deaths globally per year.
Hence, a majority of graduates rely on ‘do and learn’, which is called ‘on-the job training’ at the entry level of one’s career. Such training is less structured and lacks consistency. This approach results in several accidents in the downstream. However, these are measured as ‘Kaizens’ or ‘continual improvements’; 70-80% of such opportunities can be addressed in the upstream with people possessing the required employable skills.
Competencies are significant predictors of performance and success, and are equally as important as an individual’s academic aptitude or test scores. Hence, it is necessary to focus on observable competencies such as outcomes, workplace relevance, assessment, skills recognition, and credit transfer. With digital revolution, abundant knowledge or content on any subject is available as open source; hence, gaining knowledge is not a problem. Competency is about connecting the content to the context that the learner is going to encounter in real life.
Cognitive domain refers to the intellectual abilities acquired by thought processes at six levels as shown in the figure. Mostly, school education addresses ‘remembering’ to a large extent and ‘understanding’ to some extent. This becomes a limitation to moving to further levels as they pursue higher education.
Affective domain refers to the attitudes or values that motivate an individual to apply the intellectual abilities acquired by the cognitive domain at six levels. This domain is not well understood and applied by the education system.
Psychomotor domain refers to the body movements required to perform skills in coordination with the mind. This requires regular practice in real life environment or simulated environment and cannot be achieved in the classroom.
Swami Vivekananda
Prof. Peter Senge
Mahatma Gandhi
Competencies or outcomes have to be defined at appropriate level of the audience and the context of their learning. This is governed by ‘Blooms taxonomy’. Taxonomy is a framework in which learning objectives / outcomes are organized in a continuum with a verb and a noun. The verb describes the intended cognitive / affective / psychomotor process dimensions listed above. The noun describes the knowledge learners are expected to acquire or construct – fact, concept, procedure and meta-cognitive. For example, the student will learn to “distinguish (cognitive process) among non-federal, federal, and unitary systems of government (knowledge)”. The competencies or learning outcomes are defined using these principles which become demonstratable in the context of the learners.
A design process is required to realize the desired competencies/learning outcomes. There are several instructional design models that are used for this purpose. ADDIE is one of the popular methodologies used for learning design. The following image shows the steps and task used at each step.
Concepts such as domains of learning, Blooms Taxonomy and ADDIE model of instructional design together are used to develop and implement competency-based learning.
The National Education Policy 2020 recommends adoption of competency-based education to achieve the learning outcomes. In a competency-based education, outcomes have to be defined sharply with the context in mind. This is the first step. The second step is to choose appropriate content and pedagogy to achieve the outcomes. The last but not the least is to develop appropriate assessment tools/methodology aligned to the learning outcomes. The NEP 2020 recognizes the need to move from the current summative assessment that tests rote memorization skills to one that is more regular and formative, is more competency-based, which promotes learning and development of students, and tests higher-order skills such as analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual clarity. NEP 2020 also focuses on promoting student wellness such as fitness, good health, psycho-social well-being, and sound ethical grounding that enables high-quality learning.
<Read NEP 2020>
Competency-based Learning in Higher Education and Professional Development
Research was carried out in a few educational institutions with an innovative pedagogical framework in the last ten years. A similar approach was adopted for corporate learning towards continuous professional development of employees using the following macro-level process. Implementing such educational reforms nationwide requires extensive research to develop the know-how and processes for needs analysis, learning design & development, assessment design, learning facilitation and continuous assessment and improvement.
