Lessons Learned at CBExchange 2024

We missed posting a blog entry last week because the Nontraditional Education Program’s Instructional Designer and Director were away attending CBExchange, the annual international conference on competency-based education.

When they attended last year, MLC was at the beginning stages of our work with competency-based education. We were not yet approved to offer the CBTE Minor and were still working through the approval process with the Minnesota State Office of Higher Education for the APPLE Elementary Education degree. Our submission of the APPLE El Ed program to the Higher Learning Commission could not move forward until we had approval from the Minnesota Office of Higher Education. We had a growing list of interested learners, but we could not accept applications or enroll learners. We had ideas, but we had little implementation.

What a difference a year has made!

We returned this year with the CBTE Minor approved and with our first cohort of learners enrolled in their courses. We are one step away from approval of the APPLE El Ed program and hope to be able to begin offering courses in that program next year.

The sessions were far too rich to capture everything we learned, but we thought we would share a few of the big takeaways that will inform our work as we continue to build our competency-based education programming.

• CBTE and CBE administrators, faculty, and staff are very giving of their time and talents. Some of the best sessions we attended gave us time to share out our progress and stumbles to learn from one another. Both the Instructional Desginer and the Director have planned follow up meetings with several colleagues at other institutions.
• CBE-Network, the organization that sponsors the conference, emphasized its commitment to building partnerships with federal, state governments and higher education organizations. We look forward to attending sessions throughout the upcoming year through the CBE-Network to learn more.
• Our Instructional Designer attended several sessions about our learning environment, D2L Brightspace. He scheduled follow-up meetings with our D2L support team to find out more about several features and options to support our course development.
• Our Director attended several sessions on project management and models for supporting learners in CBE courses and programs. The insights from these sessions will help us as we scale our program and add new cohorts of learners in future terms.

The time away from campus at this conference was well spent.