1. Seattle Colleges home page
  2. Employees
  3. Faculty eLearning & Instructional Design
  4. Instructional Design & Pedagogy Support
  5. Course Design
  6. Competency Based Courses

Competency Based Courses

Introduction

Competency-based education (or competency-based learning) allows students to advance based on their ability to master a skill or competency at their own pace. This method is tailored to meet different learning abilities and can lead to more efficient student outcomes.

Alissa Sells with SBCTC (the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges) has made competency-based classes available in Canvas Commons. You can search by title or use the links below: 

List of Courses

Notes about Adoption

These courses include specific language related to competency-based instruction and are organized by competency. This means that some adjustment of language and course restructuring may be required to fit well into a quarterly schedule.

  • Example for structure: syllabi are in the Start Here module, as is common in self-paced courses. For quarterly courses, the Syllabus page is more commonly used.
  • Example for language: assessments are referred to by type: formative, summative, performance etc.

The courses linked above have only minimal formatting work; some formatting revisions may be required.  

The courses have not been checked for accessibility, so please be mindful of that as you adopt a course or portions of it. Most of the videos have captions; not all captions have been screened for accuracy. Some of the videos may be copyrighted.

Learn More