Competency-based education is not rocket science; demonstrate mastery over a particular set of material and you get a credential. This approach is common in informal education: badges for swimming and Guides, belts for martial arts, etc. Red Seal apprenticeships also operate this way.

Formal systems of education are more leery of this approach. In K-12, it is assumed that time served is more important than demonstrated skills in moving students from one level to another. Undergraduate education in North America similarly works on a time basis, with credits being defined in terms of contact hours.

The assumption, of course, is that time spent in the classroom ultimately implies skill acquisition, and hence that time-based education is just competency-based education by approximation. It’s a convenient argument for universities; essentially, it makes their function as certifiers of skills indistinguishable from their function as providers of knowledge/instruction. And by doing so, it gives them monopoly pricing power over instruction.

But what if someone could independently certify a set of knowledge and skills and say “yeah, that’s equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree”? Figuring out how to do that in a reliable way would be a genuine disruption to universities, because it would allow competing routes to credentials. Prior Learning Assessment Recognition (PLAR) – which is widespread in colleges if not universities – uses this same kind of techniques, though usually for advanced placement rather than delivering entire diplomas. So too, as a cautionary example, do many degree mills.

Western Governors University, a public, online university based in Salt Lake City, bases its degrees around “competency-units” rather than merely time-based credits, and it’s managed to convince a number of U.S. regional accreditors of the validity of such an approach. But despite the hype, WGU has its limitations. It has done very well to boost enrolment to 30,000 in under 15 years, but it’s still basically restricted to certain forms of professional certification and upgrading in business, IT, health and education – areas where external norms are easily available as reference points. Nobody has yet worked out how this would work in basic arts or sciences, where the attitude to the very notion of defined competencies verges on hatred.

That’s why things like Tuning, which documents degree-level outcomes, and AHELO, which is attempting to measure outcomes across different universities around the world, are so important. By getting people to focus on outcomes in areas where they haven’t before, they set the stage for a massive expansion of competency-based higher education.

If you’re looking for a “great disruption,” my money’s here. It’s not glamorous, and it won’t happen quickly, if at all. But unlike recently-hyped techno-solutions, it has the virtue of being both rigorous and realistic.