Effectiveness of Web-Based Learning Opportunities in a Competency-Based Program

The Master of Arts in Learning and Technology (MLT), a competency-based online degree program at Western Governors University (WGU), has been running for over fours years and has kept students wondering about the following questions.

Abstract

The Master of Arts in Learning and Technology (MLT), a competency-based online degree program at Western Governors University (WGU), has been running for over fours years. Unlike traditional degree programs, the MLT measures students’ progress by the number of assessments they have passed during a certain period. This poses a challenge for students to be highly motivated in order to complete any learning opportunities necessary to gain these competencies. The program culminates in a capstone project that requires students to identify an instructional problem and address it by designing, developing, and evaluating an instructional unit integrating technology into the instruction. When students work through each domain, they address the instructional problem from a particular angle (instructional design, research, use of technology or evaluation) by creating a project for the domain. Each project builds toward the final capstone, thus creating continuity from one project to the next. That continuity forces students to think globally about the program from the very beginning and make connections among the discrete domains. As a result, special demands are posed on learning opportunities; learning and instruction entail a drastic shift of the paradigm. In the context of competency-based education a learning opportunity refers to an instructional resource (such as an online distance course, online self-study modules, or textbook) that enables students to acquire required knowledge and skills. Some learning opportunities were more conducive to this shift than others and produced better results, which has kept us wondering about the following questions: