CBE Staying Power

The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor is one of a handful of universities with a fully accredited CBE bachelor's degree program. MyWay at UMHB is a $3000, all-you-can-master, six-month subscription CBE program that launched in August of 2016. Join the program’s Success Coach and the Instructional Designer of the program for an informal discussion about what they have gleaned from their experience so far and the issues they are grappling with as they scale the program.

Onboarding

The onboarding of students into higher education consists of assisting students to develop the right skills and attitude to prepare them for student success. A readiness assessment is completed initially for each prospective student to assess whether CBE is the right fit for them. Since the August 2016 launch of our CBE program, MyWay at UMHB, students and the coach meet face-to-face on campus, and in online sessions. These sessions help with the onboarding process as they provide opportunities for student engagement and interaction, which promotes student success and development. Students identify what method of communication works best for them. The Coach contacts students on a weekly basis for the first month. After that, student preference determines the frequency of communication. Moreover, the coaching sessions during the onboarding phase have proven successful as many students have commented on the desire to put a face with the name of their coach. It allows for a more personal approach for both coach and student to get to know each other.  

Student Retention

Advising, tutoring, instructional and technical support, education access and accommodations, career services, counseling services all encompass retention initiatives. The MyWay at UMHB community makes every effort to provide students with these services. Although online advising sessions are available, the majority of MyWay students prefer face-to-face advising. Case in point, during the first couple months of the launch of our CBE program, some MyWay students experienced technical difficulties and were challenged with navigating and submitting assessments on the learning platform. After visiting with their coach and professor, students had a better understanding and were more confident in completing and mastering their competencies. Tutoring is available via Tutor.com. Subject matter experts provide students with instructional assistance, and our IT department provides technical support. Technical issues are handled promptly, usually within 24 hours. MyWay students have access to campus amenities and accommodations just as our traditional students at UMHB. These include the writing center, library, gym and fitness center. Students can request a free student ID card to utilize the campus services. Walk-in career and counseling services are also available.

Coaching

Coaching involves establishing a relationship with the student. The central focus is to build a rapport with students to help them achieve their goals. Coaches help students help themselves. Coaching brings about a sense of empowerment for students as it helps them to take ownership of their education. It encourages students to think critically and keeps them engaged in their learning. Coaches monitor student progress consistently to ensure student success.  

Advising students and inquiring about their goals is all a part of the coaching process. Helping students explore what their purpose and objectives are, provides coaches with a better understanding of how to best serve their students. Since coaching is personal, the sessions help the coach identify students' goals and potential challenges that may prevent a student from staying on task throughout their educational journey.

Benefits of coaching:

• Fosters student development and success

• Builds rapport with students

• Opportunity for intentional, meaningful connections with students

• Brings about holistic advisement which tailors to the student as a whole, not just academically

Efficiency and Scale

About the CBE business model components of price, efficiency, and scale, Desrochers and Staisloff (2016) state that, “Achieving sustainability at that price range [$6k annually] requires an increase in efficiency and significant scale” (p. 10).

According to Desrochers and Staisloff (2016), scale refers to increased recruitment, enrollment, and retention of students. That is straightforward; we know what we have to do, so I’ll start with scale.

Our plan for scaling the MyWay program always involved starting small. We limited recruitment and enrollment to 50 students for the first year, to work out problems as they arose, and we went the extra mile to retain those students. Much of the first year’s expenses focused on developing the academic program, new technology, and new faculty and staff roles. Marketing and recruitment expenditures were very limited but will increase significantly in the coming months. In addition to online marketing, UMHB will partner with local employers to grow the enrollment. We will continue to focus on retaining the students who are already in the program.

We know that for our competency-based education program to have staying power, we have to increase efficiency each year until the MyPath CBE program is self-sustaining. Desrochers and Staisloff (2016) found that efficiency can improve with the use of technology, personnel-to-student ratios, and compensation. It’s a short sentence, but efficiency requires some creative problem solving. We can leverage technology for a thousand students instead of twenty without ruffling any feathers, so we won’t spend time on that.

Competency-based education brings new faculty and staff roles onto the scene. CBE programs typically include a mix of Success Coaches, Mentors, Facilitators, Moderators, Badge Graders or Assessors. We have adopted three of these roles at UMHB: Success Coach, Moderators, and Badge Graders, with Mentors on the roadmap. We are grappling with how to improve the efficiency of each of these roles as the program develops.

UMHB created a fully accredited bachelor’s degree (120 credit hour equivalencies) before launching the program. One of the unknowns we faced in August was actually a known - as a degree-completion program, we knew that we had to prepare for the student who started the program with a handful of transfer credits as well as for the student with 90 transfer credits. That meant having every course ready for students when the program launched and having a Moderator on a six-month retainer for each course in the program. With monthly student starts, we had to maintain the lineup of Moderators even if many of them never had a student. While that was necessary to launch the program, it isn’t a sustainable model.

As we scale, can we assign the five management learning apps to one Moderator, the seven leadership learning apps to another Moderator? Can one Moderator manage several Gen Ed courses?

Can we increase the student-to-faculty ratios to 200 students per Moderator without sacrificing the quality of education or burning out our faculty? Does the technology allow for that degree of increased productivity?

Can the Success Coach succeed in managing as many as 200 students at a time by using learning platform technology to monitor student progress?

The answer appears to be yes if we have staying power.

Currently, full-time faculty members with full-time benefits serve as Badge Graders to evaluate student projects, but in a more efficient model, specially trained part-time assessors could accomplish this task.

Resource

Desrochers, D. M. & Staisloff, R. L. (2016). Competency-Based Education: A Study of Four New Models and Their Implications for Bending the Higher Education Cost Curve. [Online PDF]. Retrieved from http://rpkgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/rpkgroup_cbe_business_model_report_20161018.pdf