Acronyms are pretty prevalent across the synod and our campus. LES? Lutheran Elementary School. ALHS? Area Lutheran High School. BIC? Bible Information Class. DP? District President.

As we build our CBE (competency-based education) programming at MLC (Martin Luther College), we are adding a few new acronyms to our WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) vocabulary.

You may have heard our instructional designer or director refer to OER. What is OER?

An OER is an Open Educational Resource. The easiest way to understand OER is to consider each acronym element.

Open – OER are publicly available, free resources. These resources are often curated by academic libraries, publishers, museums, and organizations committed to sharing knowledge with others.

Educational – OER are typically created by individual scholars and teachers or groups to share information with others. Many OERs are also peer-reviewed to ensure that the information is accurate.

Resources – They can take many forms, from the OER logo included in this post to a recorded lecture. They can be articles, chapters, and even an entire book. In fact, the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary maintains a large OER of essay files crafted by scholars from our church body’s beginning through to recent symposia.

There are many benefits to using OER, but we’ll highlight a few here.

• OER can be integrated into online learning environments in a way that physical resources cannot.
• OER can incorporate digital media, like videos, interactive charts, and hyperlinks, to additional resources in a way that physical resources cannot.
• OER are free to instructors and learners.
• OER are often built to meet accessibility needs, including video captioning, image tagging, and screenreader functionality.

The course design process for our competency-based education programming includes an intentional discussion with MLC Librarians, the instructional designer building the course, and the subject matter expert crafting the content to identify appropriate OER materials.

This four-part mini-series of blogs by our instructional designer, Dr. Martin LaGrow, will share the technical, logistical, and academic approach to building MLC’s first competency-based education program.

Ensuring Academic Rigor

Since its inception, Martin Luther College (and before that, Doctor Martin Luther College) has existed to prepare people to serve in the ministry of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Over a hundred years ago, for obvious reasons, not much thought was given to what “online delivery” of instruction might look like for our students! The college existed as a physical destination for students who, having grown up in the WELS, aspired to serve in the WELS just as their favorite pastors and teachers (and often parents) did.

In recent years, we have experienced an increase in potential students who do not fit this customary mold. Potential future ministry candidates are not always the students who have attended Luther Preparatory School, an area Lutheran high school, or even a Lutheran Elementary School. Many have come to know the WELS later in life and have an established home, family, job, and WELS church—and not the ability to uproot and relocate to attend college in person easily.

This explains three unique aspects of our nontraditional program.

First, we are designing the program for returning adult learners who are not able to complete their degree on our campus in New Ulm.

Second, these learners are not expected to attend classes in person, though there will be synchronous virtual sessions and meetings, and will complete the majority of their coursework in a flexibly paced online learning environment.

Third, we are designing for learners who may not have been exposed to years of WELS religion courses as the majority of our traditional undergrads have. This difference in background holds a few implications for how instruction is designed.

With the diverse backgrounds and experiences of our incoming students, we can make no assumption about their background in the study of doctrine. It is true that many may have grown up going to church all their lives and may have informal knowledge of doctrine. Others may be relatively new to the faith and learned all they know from their church’s new member information class. Either way, this gives us the opportunity to approach instruction with a “clean slate,” and the impetus to build our Bible History and Literature courses around reading the whole Bible and building our lessons with a guided approach to engaging with Scripture. Secondly, it encourages us to be thoughtful about providing our students with diverse faculty members. We rely strongly on learned and respected theology instructors that our traditional students see daily at Martin Luther College. However, others may be WELS associate faculty who are fluent in Lutheran doctrine but may have come to us through a less traditional background, giving them the unique ability to understand where our CBE students are coming from.

Each course in the CBTE Minor is planned and designed to leverage the online medium to prepare a returning adult learner to join the public ministry as a called worker. The courses cover the same topics as our traditional classes. They rely on many of the same resources that our traditional classes rely on. Instead of lecture sessions, learners engage with a series of videos created or curated by the instructor to explain the course’s concepts. Instead of worksheets, their readings are guided through focus questions and comprehension check quizzes. Instead of in-person discussions with their peers, online discussion boards and reflection journals encourage a deepening knowledge and thoughtful application of the course concepts.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the doctrinal integrity of our program is bolstered by the cooperation of our campus theology faculty, but it is not our only assurance that our learners are on the same footing as traditional students. The competencies, as described in previous blogs, represent the cooperation and hard work of our theology faculty in putting before CBTE learners on a path that leads them not just to a deeper understanding of Scriptural truths and doctrinal applications but to validate their personal study and effort to serve in the WELS ministry.

The end result is that the program of study looks different because it is designed for a different learner. However, the goals of MLC remain the same. To train men and women to meet the public ministry needs of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

This four-part mini-series of blogs by our instructional designer, Dr. Martin LaGrow, will share the technical, logistical, and academic approach to building MLC’s first competency-based education program.

CBE: Education Based on, well, Competencies!

In the first post in this series, we have looked at the technical framework of the new MLC CBE program. In this post, we’ll address the academic foundation of the program: the competencies. When the idea of creating this program originated seven years ago, a conscious decision was made to use this philosophical approach with the understanding that our returning adult learners bring a wealth of experience, and we should recognize and honor that with our design approach. The benefit is that someone who has mastered the required competencies through life and work should be able to leverage those competencies to advance through a course or program. In our context, the competencies fall into four domains: knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that students must demonstrate at a level of proficiency.

How Does it Work?

Allow me an oversimplified illustration. Let’s take the skill of tying knots as a subject of study. A traditionally presented course would have course objectives, weekly content to read/view in the lessons, practice, and then an assignment to tie knots: bowline, slip knot, sheepshank, square knot, etc. One week would be spent presenting a whole class with each knot, spending time on teaching and learning, and then assessing and evaluating. At the end of a week, one learner might get an A on tying square knots, others a B, and maybe even one learner might receive an F because they never mastered it. Regardless, the whole class moves on to the next knot when a new week arrives.

In a competency-based model, a learner might have been a sailor and have vast experience in tying some knots, while another learner may have only ever worn Velcro shoes! The experienced learner might fly through the content and be able to prove she can tie a masterful knot or two in the first couple of days of the course. She demonstrates her mastery and moves on to spend more time on the knots that are unfamiliar to her. At no point does she get an F and fail to tie a new kind of knot; it’s simply time to remediate with the teacher and try again. The inexperienced learner soaks up the content and instruction and attempts each knot until he is proficient and can demonstrate it, moving on when ready.

Thus, it is possible for CBE courses in some subject areas—Mathematics, for example—to be easily adapted for individual learners to operate at their own pace. In other areas, such as Theology, we are careful not to accelerate students through the spiritual training we’d like them to receive. But we do want to ensure that they show proficiency in every competency in the program; there is no ‘failing’ a theological competency, simply wrestling with it until proficiency is reached.

Where do competencies come from?

Alternative Pathway to Professional Licensure Eligibility (APPLE)

For the APPLE program we are building, this was very easy to determine. Just like our students on campus at MLC, it is required that APPLE students pass the Standards of Effective Practice (SEP) established by the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) and the Teachers of Elementary Education requirements. These standards give us a built-in framework of competencies to measure, and they are already aligned with MLC’s curriculum. These standards can be measured through a variety of assessments based on the nature of the standard. For example, Standard 4.1 says: “The teacher explores and applies instructional design principles to create innovative digital learning environments that engage and support learning.” A learner in our CBE program could demonstrate mastery of this standard by sharing a written plan for a lesson or a video of a classroom activity. The documentation of meeting the standard is assessed, and their success in meeting the standard is recorded.

What about Theology Competencies?

Because MLC has not taught the Theology minor with a CBE approach previously, there was no existing framework of competencies. Thus, one of the first tasks of the instructional designer was to collaborate with the theology faculty to craft them. About 70 competencies were written to reflect the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs instilled in our Theology minor. These competencies aligned with the Theology program goals and fall into four broader domains:

• Understanding scriptures Christocentrically,
• Applying law and gospel to self and others,
• Embracing and evangelically defending Lutheran doctrine, and
• Serving in all vocations under the cross.

These four overarching domains encompass the individual competencies that have been defined and will be measured across our six theology-focused courses.

A Look Ahead to Next Week’s Post

Now that we’ve looked at the LMS adopted for our new program and the structure of the competencies that will be evaluated, it’s time to take a deeper look into the course design process. In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at the creation of the new modality of courses themselves and even take a peek into the student experience in a CBE course at MLC.

CBTE Is the First Step The Competency-Based Theological Education (CBTE) Minor is the first step in building a pathway for returning adult learners. We intentionally focused on our CBTE Minor first for several reasons: First, our pastors and principals shared that the CBTE Minor is what those serving our schools in various roles need to […]

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. 2 Corinthians 3:2 The Competency-Based Theology Education (CBTE) Minor application requires a letter of reference. The letter of reference serves two purposes. It demonstrates your connection to a WELS or WELS-affiliated church body and shares the ways you are currently living […]