Introducing a New Way To Evaluate: Competency Based Education

Derek Nichols

After a lengthy EAP, Blackbaud’s Competency Based Education is now available for all Academic-based schools to use. Come learn more about this new evaluation method.

 In June, our Learning Management System (LMS) team released our Competency Based Education (CBE) functionality. But what exactly is it?

CBE allows schools to move away from a traditional alpha-numeric grading system and instead rate students based on skills that need to be mastered. Schools can even use a hybrid grading module which allows them to evaluate students on specific skills as well as provide total score values for assignments. Our new Competency based education module provides schools with a better way to track learning goals and student progression toward mastering these learning goals.  

Schools can setup two Skill types, Content-area and Transferable skills. Content-area skills are directly tied to courses or class subjects while Transferable skills span a student’s entire academic experience at a school. For each skill type, academic group managers can set the following:

• Mastery rating
• Computation method
• Sub-skills
• Naming convention
• Skill categories

In addition, we have added multiple Data imports for Competency based education to make it easier for schools to populate this data. To learn more about setting up Competency based education for your school, take a look at our help and this video! 

Competency based education will also change the teacher experience for creating and evaluating assignments. For example, if a school is using a hybrid of Mastery and total score grading, teachers will have the ability to create assignments that are just Mastery assignments, Total score assignments, or a hybrid of both.

When creating their Mastery assignments, teachers can select the skills and/or sub-skills that should be associated with the assignment. Teachers can also create Formative assignments, which will be excluded from their computation method but can still be used to evaluate student progress toward learning goals. Teachers are able to evaluate Mastery assignments from the Assignment detail page as well as from their Gradebook. Each skill or sub-skill associated with an assignment will have their own column in the Gradebook and the Assignment column can be used for Total scores if the teacher is using Mastery and total score for their evaluation method. In addition, teachers have access to:

• Mastery overview: lists all students in their course with their ratings for each skill associated with the course and their sub-skills
• Learning progression: can be viewed from a Student’s profile and shows an aggregate mastery rating for each skill according to the school’s computation method and how the student is trending toward each skill.

To learn more about teachers and Competency based education, see our help and this video!  

That’s going to do it for today, but we’ll have something else for you to check out on Thursday before our monthly recap next week. Thanks for reading everyone, see you next time!

Melissa Battis

Will we be getting color coding or class averages in the Mastery overview?  The Learning progression is beautiful, but the Mastery Overview is hard to read and has no class average in it.  It would be great to have something like the Learning Progression show up for a teacher to quickly and easily look through.



Also, is there a plan to connect this to Graded Assessments and Discussions?  I love what you have, but I am looking forward to seeing it continue to grow and update to become even better!