Building on Statewide Online, Competency-based Education: Learn on Demand

Community colleges are well aware of the difficulty that older students may have as they juggle school with work and caregiving responsibilities. With a large number of adults without a postsecondary credential in the state, the Kentucky Community & Technical College System has made it a priority to provide opportunities to access education that accommodates busy lives. The Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) devised a strategy ten years ago that would increase access for working adults and allow them to study at the pace their lives allow.

In 2009, as the Great Recession was in full swing, system leaders acknowledged the difficulty that working Kentuckians were having with a traditional semester schedule that was not built with their needs in mind. In response, they created Learn on Demand (LOD), a set of programs that are modular, self-paced, and workforce-relevant. Students choose to enroll at several given dates and proceed through the program at a speed that works for them as they demonstrate mastery of new skills and knowledge. With its self-paced, competency-based approach, Learn on Demand made it possible for participating KCTCS institutions to reach prospective students and help them earn workforce-relevant credentials.

Learn on Demand also provides students with opportunities to earn credit for prior learning for every class.¹ Before starting a class, students take a pre-test to assess their competency. If they reach a certain score and pass the course post-test, they receive credit for the course. For some students, self-paced learning may mean taking longer than the traditional course length to complete. For others, a quick pre- and post-test may be enough to prove that they deserve credit for their existing knowledge and skills. Learn on Demand’s adaptability makes for an individually tailored learning experience.

The model is administered jointly by the system’s central office and seven charter colleges that created and provide the programs.² The central office provides important services like dedicated success coaches, faculty training, and technology support. The delivering college keeps 90 percent of the tuition revenue and contributes 10 percent of the remaining revenue to a distribution pool that is divided equally among the colleges and the central office at the end of the year. While many new degree programs were supported by external grants like TAACCCT, the charter colleges can also propose new programs to the group and receive a small loan from the central office to get them started.

The KCTCS central office and the charter colleges have continued to strategically use grant funds to build out LOD. In 2011, the system received funding from Complete College America to provide professional development to faculty and advisors about LOD.³ And in 2013, Elizabethtown Community & Technical College, a KCTCS institution, was awarded a TAACCCT grant—Online2Workforce—to create modularized, competency-based, online courses in business. These would be available throughout the system while the college was building out the LOD success coaching model. The program served over 450 students who earned 107 credentials during the grant period, which is a large impact for a single-institution TAACCCT grant.⁴ That scale was possible due to the systemwide nature of the LOD model. Six KCTCS institutions received additional TAACCCT funding through a Round 4 grant—Enhancing Programs for IT Certification—to create additional information technology programs available through LOD.

Today, KCTCS students can earn competency-based credentials in IT, business, medical IT, criminal justice, and logistics and operations management. In this time of uncertainty, LOD remains a critical strategy to reach Kentuckians who could benefit from these programs, wherever they may be located throughout the state. KCTCS’s opportunistic strategy to sustain and improve an existing statewide consortium with grant funds rather than building a new initiative from scratch provides a valuable example for other states and systems.

The struggle of working adults to balance family life and school work has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as many children are learning from home and normal support from friends and family may be limited to slow the spread of the virus. The statewide collaboration represented by Learn on Demand can provide lessons for addressing some of these struggles while allowing colleges to build on their strengths.