Adult learners often have significant prior learning, and thus benefit from enrollment in alternative credit courses. We will demonstrate how acceptance of alternative credits can have a positive impact on student outcomes by sharing three perspectives: that of a competency-based alternative credit provider, a university, and a student.
Many non-traditional students who enter degree programs have some amount of prior learning from professional experiences outside of the classroom. Research has consistently shown that students who are able to enroll in a higher education institution with transfer credits are more likely to be successful academically and less likely to drop out of their programs. This is particularly true of adult learners. In fact, according to CAEL’s 2018 study on prior learning assessment that included over 26,000 adult learners across four different institutions, “adult students earning PLA credit had better academic outcomes in terms of degree completion and persistence” than students who did not earn PLA credit.
This session will demonstrate how a partnership between a self-paced, competency-based online course provider and a large university benefitted students who attended the university. Using propensity score matching methodologies, we found that students attending the university while also earning alternative credit from the competency-based courses had higher completions and persistence than those who did not. To achieve these outcomes, the course provider offers a lower-cost, more flexible means for students to complete some of their general education requirements, with a combination of exams and authentic assessment on a custom learning platform and over 55 courses to choose from. Students who complete the competency-based courses are able to demonstrate their prior learning through an alternative credit pathway and transfer those courses to one of 60 partner schools.
Throughout the presentation, a student ambassador who has taken courses with the competency-based course provider and transferred credit to a degree program will share the impact of this experience on her academic journey. The student has thus far completed 10 courses with the competency-based course provider, all of which were accepted by her university for credit toward her degree. In the student’s words, “I enjoyed being able to complete the classes at my own pace and on my own schedule, as I am employed full time as well as a wife and mother— it gave me the most flexibility to maintain a work/life balance.”
To give further insight into the actual course experience, the Manager of Instructional Design and Development at the competency-based course provider will share a curriculum design strategy centered around andragogical principles that allows adult learners to apply general education course concepts to real-world contexts. Some of these design decisions include curriculum benchmarking against the broader higher education landscape to ensure appropriate coverage of course concepts; rigorous, high-quality assessments (both formative and summative) that require the application of course material, demonstrating the concepts’ immediate relevance to learners; and a user-friendly platform and course layout to help students succeed in an asynchronous, online, self-paced environment. To ensure the ongoing quality of courses, the provider also performs a quality assurance review on all assessments, analyzes assessment item difficulty and discrimination on a regular basis, and collects student feedback about each course in order to implement any needed changes to curriculum and assessments to improve the student experience.
The Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Quality at the university will then speak to the institution’s unique model enabling students to take the alternative credit courses for free as an option within the course planning system, and present data depicting how this offering has translated into better outcomes, such as the reduction of debt and time to completion, for students enrolled at the university. This university also completed propensity score matching, a method to control for demographic variables when evaluating the success rates of populations, and can report on the positive outcomes using that data analysis methodology.
By providing three unique perspectives on credit for prior learning — from a course provider, a university, and a student — we will demonstrate how acceptance of this credit is beneficial to all parties with a goal of increasing student success at the college level. During the session, we will also encourage the audience members to consider their unique roles as curriculum designers, administrators, or students, and engage in dialogue around the following questions:
- What support does your institution currently provide for adult learners or other non-traditional students?
- What role, if any, has alternative credit played in your own education journey or that of your students?
- What current barriers do you see to providing credit through alternative means, and how might you overcome them?