I’m Facilitating a Webinar on CBE on 1/18

I’ll be facilitating a webinar on Competency-Based Education (CBE) next Thursday as the culmination of a three-part series about the changing higher education landscape hosted by Open LMS. The first webinar was about the connections between higher ed and workforce learning. The second was about international education. In this third webinar, we’ll be talking about how support for CBE ties in to the prior two webinar themes. CBE can be a very useful tool for colleges and universities to reach students that they often have trouble reaching. I’ll be publishing a longer post about this connection early next week.

For now, I’d like to say a bit about how we’re going to approach CBE in the webinar and a bit about the host and guests.

On CBE, I find there are generally two very different groups. The first camp is the believers who are thoroughly immersed in it and are thinking deeply about how to overcome the challenges of implementing it effectively at scale. The second group is more diverse but share the common trait that they have not bought into CBE yet. Some like the idea in principle but see the hurdles to getting started as daunting. Some worry that CBE could effectively dismantle aspects of education that they cherish by reducing it to parts. And some just haven’t thought about it much.

This webinar is aimed at the latter group, although I encourage CBE enthusiasts to come, both because they help spread the word about an approach they believe in and because I do believe the webinar could still unearth some nuggets of new knowledge for them—especially those that are trying to push ahead but hitting obstacles early. CBE can be a slippery slope that feels like an all-or-nothing strategy. We’ll be breaking that down a bit and trying to make it more accessible to schools and programs that are interested but might not see an on-ramp.

While this won’t be primarily a software demo webinar, we will be showing some software features to illustrate those on-ramps and some foundational points about CBE for the uninitiated.

Our guests include the following:

• Brad Koch, Vice President of Education & Strategy at Open LMS: Brad is another Open LMS guy that I’ve known and counted as a friend in EdTech for decades. I met him at Angel Learning, where he was involved in designing features that other LMSs are still catching up with today. He has worked on almost every major higher education LMS with a significant presence in the US.
• Laurie Pulido, CEO of Ease Learning: Laurie has been thinking about CBE for a very long time, having been one of the earliest learning designers at SNHU back in 2005. That deep expertise shows in the product and service work Ease Learning has been doing.

We’ll also be joined by Brad Schweitzer, Product Manager at Open LMS, who will be helping us with some of the product details.

I want to say a word about our hosts Open LMS as well. As I have noted in past posts about this series, I am picky about who I do paid webinars for. I have been interested in Open LMS both because I know and respect the senior leadership, because they have incredible breadth of reach across sectors and geographies in education, and because they’ve been very flexible in working with me to turn this series into something other than a showcase for their products and services. While you will get more of a look at their product in this webinar than you did in the last two, they continue to support me in shaping the series to be focused on the broader needs of the broad range of customers and partners that they serve. The platform is interesting, competitive, and worth a look. But the series really shows the values of Open LMS, which is often harder to get a read on with a vendor until after you’ve already signed a contract.

Again, the panel is Wednesday, January 18th at 1 PM EST. Register here.