Learners learn, with or without a teacher
Traditional education puts the teacher in the spotlight: present, lecture, demonstrate, assign homework. That limits options. Many people respond well to a lecture. Others need hands-on practice. Others need to try, fail and try again. And many of the best ways to learn don't involve a teacher at all.
The purpose of any learning experience is to help a person acquire a skill. Anything that does that counts.
Ideas for learning activities
- Live lecture, or a recorded one people can watch anytime
- Trial and error
- A conversation with an expert
- Apprenticeship
- Drawing a diagram or building a model
- Reading a book
- Watching someone perform the skill and imitating them
- Online or library research
- Writing a paper or blog article
- Teaching a class
- Pair programming (it isn't just for programmers)
- Job shadowing
- Mentoring or coaching
Include practice ideas too: tutorials, katas or simple suggestions people can try on their own.
Transferable skills
No two learners are alike. Some arrive with a blank slate. Others bring years of experience. It makes little sense to make an experienced person sit through classes on skills they already have.
Universities solve this with transfer credit. CDD does the same thing for skills. If someone already has the skill, they prove it and are recognized, and they skip the rest. It doesn't matter whether they picked it up at a past job, in school or in life. What matters is that they have the skill and can use it.
Self-paced learning
A core idea in competency-based learning is that a person shouldn't move on until they've proven mastery of the previous step. That's hard in a classroom with one teacher and thirty students, because someone either holds the class back or gets left behind.
When competencies drive the system and learning materials are available online, each person can move at a pace that suits them. One person may pick up a skill quickly and need longer on the next. Roles flip. That's normal and expected.
Learning pathways
Leading with a clear set of competencies lets you arrange them along a continuum of difficulty. Easier or foundational skills come first. Harder ones come later. Skills that lead naturally to others are placed in order.
Not every skill applies to everyone, so pathways are built by audience: a role, team, department or business unit. Think of grade levels. They divide a large body of skills into manageable groups, so everyone knows what comes next.
A pathway has:
- Modules: a set of competencies grouped by area and difficulty
- Levels: groups of modules (like 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade)
- Audience: who the module is for
- Learning materials: curated resources for each competency
- Evaluation instructions: how to ask for and prepare for the evaluation
Learning materials can be built in-house, bought, or simply curated from what already exists. If you use an entire course, point people to the section that targets your competency.
Keep learning off the badge
When it's time to publish badges, keep learning activities and evaluation instructions in a separate place and link to them. A badge is meant to describe what its holder can do for a future employer. Heavy training details on the badge itself draw attention away from the skill. (More on badges.)