Austin, Texas — Sept. 5
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and College for All Texans Foundation have partnered with Pearson to work with two state institutions — Texas A&M University-Commerce and South Texas College — to create a competency-based learning Bachelor of Applied Sciences degree in organizational leadership.
The program is called the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Project and is supported by an EDUCAUSE Next Generation Learning Challenges grant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Faculty from both institutions are leading the curriculum design effort with Pearson, assisting in the development of 90 credit hours of online competency-based courses and providing custom curriculum and instructional design that aligns with the competencies established by the faculty. The program will launch in spring 2014 and is expected to serve 250 students in its first year and enroll more than 6,000 students by 2019.
The BAS in Organizational Leadership curriculum centers on the skills outlined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Liberal Education and America’s Promise initiative.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state agency that coordinates postsecondary education in Texas, is overseeing this initiative along with its nonprofit organization, College for All Texans Foundation.
Rather than focusing on student seat time, the project’s competency-based learning program shifts the focus to student mastery. This enables students to accelerate through the degree program by allowing them to receive credit upon evidence of competency mastery through faculty-approved assessments at the lower-division level.
Source: Pearson
