Using Communities of Practice to Identify Competencies

Introduction

Competency-based education (CBE) is a popular innovation being explored and implemented by many institutions of higher education throughout the United States. A majority of the work currently being done is focused on strategies for developing and implementing CBE courses and programs. Primary areas of effort currently include development of new administrative and technical infrastructures required for CBE, including separating administrative functions away from the traditional credit-hour system; unbundling of the faculty role; and development of next-generation learning management systems. Yet relatively less effort has been paid to the identification of the competencies as a field. While many articles and case studies discuss the identification of competencies, many describe this step in general or vague terms using language such as, “the CBE development team worked with industry experts” to identify competencies, but detail as to actual techniques is lacking. This chapter identifies communities of practice (COP) as a particularly effective resource for colleges and universities to use in their work identifying competencies.

Communities of practice (COP) are internal organizational or industry-specific groups created explicitly to explore ways to boost productivity and improve organizational capacity. Mupepi, Mupepi, and Motiwan (2015) identify a community of practice as a collaborative forum that can be enacted to create diffuse and distributed explicit knowledge and expertise within a specific topical area. Communities of practice may be relatively small, located within a single organization or they may be larger, focusing on an industry and encompassing multiple companies and experts. In general, COP focus on continuous performance improvement and the development of organizational capacity within their respective industries of focus and, therefore, have the expertise necessary to identify the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and technology required for optimum organizational effectiveness (Figure 1). The collaborative nature of COP can give rise to a shared awareness among constituencies of the understanding, skill sets, and abilities that must be translated into competencies that incumbents must be able to demonstrate in the workforce and CBE students must demonstrate mastery of as part of their programs.

Furthermore, such shared awareness can potentially contribute to the issues of transferability and articulation of CBE courses that continue to be an area of ongoing concern for institutions of higher education in the development of their programs.

Figure 1.

Thefocus of the COP is building effective organizational capacity

(Mupepi, 2010)

The chapter is organized into three parts. The first part offers an overview of ‘competency’ in terms of both its definition and in terms of the importance of competency validation for education and evaluation purposes. The second part presents ‘communities of practice’ (COP) as a collaborative forum for identifying competencies relevant to an organization or industry. This section also proposes a framework, including strategies and techniques, for use within the COP. Finally, the chapter will consider ways that colleges and universities can work with a COP to identify competencies needed by graduates now and in the future.

Overview Of Competencies Within Compretency-Based Education (Cbe)

The term ‘competent’ is defined as, “having the necessary ability or skills: able to do something well or well enough to meet a standard (Merriam-Webster, 2016) while ‘competence’ is defined as ‘the state of being competent’ and a ‘competency’ is defined as an ability or skill. Weisbord (1987) explained the relationship among the various terms thusly: ‘competence’ is a performance criterion while ‘competencies’ are the behaviors driving the competence. In other words, a person executes ‘competencies’ to demonstrate that he or she is ‘competent’. Dror and Harnad (2008) propound that competence lies at the intersection of required attitudes, knowledge, skills, and tools/technology (Figure 2). They further contend that if one of these elements if missing or insufficiently learned, then competence will be compromised. The questions for CBE course developers, then, are, “What are the competencies that comprise competence and, therefore, must be mastered by the learner?” and “What attitudes, knowledge, skills, and tools/technology must the learner have to execute or demonstrate a specific competency?”