In our ever-evolving work to increase access to college education, Mt. SAC is one of seven California Community Colleges to pilot a new learning modality, Direct Assessment Competency-Based Education, or CBE. Through Mt. SAC's Chancellor's office approved and ACCJC accredited CBE program students will be able to earn an AA in Kinesiology at their own pace. CBE is outcomes-based so students learn and then demonstrate their knowledge and abilities through direct assessment. Although the modality and assessments are different, the classes and the rigor are the same.

In today's episode we are joining Mike Hood, Astronomy Professor and CBE Faculty Lead, Lani Ruh, Co-Coordinator Kinesiology Professor, and Eva Figueroa Morales, Instructional Designer, at their Spring Flex Day session, to learn more about this new modality and the opportunities it offers for those who have not been able to fit traditional classes into their lives.

Resources:

California Community College Chancellor's Office, (2025). Direct Assessment Competency-Based Education. "DA CBE aims to create equitable access to educational pathways and career opportunities. It accommodates diverse abilities, and backgrounds through flexibly-paced learning that focuses on what students know and can do rather than the time spent in the classroom."

California Community College Chancellor's Office, (2025). Direct Assessment: Competency-Based Education, Implementation Blueprint. Resource co-developed with eight early innovator colleges to support the design and implementation of direct assessment CBE programs across California.

Competency-Based Education Network

Access guides, research, case studies, and blogs on CBE.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• DA-CBE Update 5/8/2025 Academic Senate Meeting

Run time: 35 min, 13 sec

To Find the full transcript for this episode click HERE

Flexibility is the goal here, allowing students to start when they are able to, allowing students to begin the program without waiting till the end of the semester adds this extra flexibility for students.

Welcome to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast. I'm Chisa Uyeki, a Mt. SAC professor and librarian, and I'm pleased to be your host for this season. Our goal is to keep you connected to our campus by bringing you the activities, and events you may not have time to attend, to share the interesting things our colleagues are creating and innovative ways they are supporting and connecting with Mt. Sac students. Join me as we explore Mt. SAC.

In our ever-evolving work to increase access to college education, Mt. Sac is one of 7 California community colleges to pilot a new learning modality, Direct Assessment Competency-Based Education, or CBE. Through Mt. Sac's CBE program, students will be able to earn an AA in Kinesiology at their own pace. CBE is outcomes-based. Students learn and then demonstrate their knowledge and abilities through direct assessment. Although the modality and assessments are different, the classes and their rigor are the same. In today's episode, we are joining Mike Hood, astronomy professor and CBE faculty lead, Lani Ruh, co-coordinator and kinesiology professor, and Eva Figueroa Morales, instructional designer, at their Spring Flex Day session, during which we learn about this new modality and the opportunities it provides for those who have not been able to fit traditional classes into their lives. Listen in about this innovative way students will begin learning at Mt. SAC starting in fall 2026.

Hello, my name is Mike Hood. We are going to talk all about direct assessment and competency-based education today. Uh, here is our sort of main core team, including Loni Rue, who is here. She's the kinesiology faculty lead. Conway Yeo is our project manager. Madeline Abayo has been heavily involved as the VP of the School of Continuing Ed, and Sylvia Ruano is now taking over sort of the lead as Dean of Instruction. So first off, what is direct assessment competency-based education? The sort of general way to think of this is that instead of ending a course when a, when the semester ends, a student ends a course when they they've learned the material they need to understand that course. So the idea of this is it makes courses much, much more flexible than a regular online or in-person course would be.

That's one of the goals here. And when we're designing our classes and designing things in this modality is to make these as absolutely flexible as for students as we possibly can. So what we are working on is building a direct assessment CBE program. It's the Associate Degree in Kinesiology, the transfer version. So it is an ADT that students will be working towards. And when we are running this program, we think of this not as separate courses or as a separate program, but really a different modality. So just like any course can be offered in person or online, this is a new modality that we're going to offer these courses in CBE mode. As well.

So what CBE really does is students are going to finish their courses when they complete the competencies for that course. That is something that faculty have been working on for a long time of building up our competencies and figuring out how to break courses into pieces. I'll talk a little more about that in a bit, but once a student has completed the competencies for that course, they get credit for that course and they move on. So the big The big difference here is that students can work at the pace that they need to work at. I think that's the big change and that's the big positive for students, and that's the reason that I got involved in this personally, is seeing situations where a student came into a course and was doing very well and they're going through their coursework and then something happens in their life and they aren't able to put in the time needed for a week or for 2 weeks and it leads to them not passing that class because they had had to miss time because something happened, because their schedule is not the same week to week. With competency-based education, that becomes not a problem anymore. If a student needs to step away to deal with family situations, to work more that week, to do something that means they can't focus on their class for a week or two, that's okay. They come back, they work on it again when they are able to.

It gives them that flexibility. On the flip side, this also is a situation where a student that has prior knowledge in that area that can dedicate more time to their courses can also move faster. So it lends a flexibility for students that isn't there with a traditional 16-week semester system. As it says here, students may extend their coursework even into consecutive terms. So if a student has started a course, they have started taking this class, and they don't finish it at the end of 16 weeks, they can continue on in the next semester as well. Again, increasing the flexibility. It also means students have the option to start a course later if they finish their previous class in a sequence partway through a term. They can start the next one immediately and join a new class because they don't need to cut off right at the end of that 16 weeks.

They can continue on to the next semester as well. So the Big piece that we are also building in here is intensive faculty and coach support. This flexibility is great, and everyone likes to be able to do things on their own time, but flexibility can also be a trap. Like, if there's not a deadline, sometimes that becomes hard to get stuff done. I very much know that myself. A big piece of building this program in, in a successful way is we are thinking all along how we are going to support students through this learning, how we are going to help them both from faculty side and from coaches that will be people that can help students sort of stay motivated, do check-ins. And our vision for these coaches is that they will be someone that will follow along with the student throughout their whole program rather than a faculty member who's only with them for their one course. Other big goal here is to expand access.

And that's a big part of the reason that kinesiology was chosen for this degree, for this program and this pilot, is because we're looking for a way to make these courses at Mt. Sac available to students that currently can't do that. If you have a very variable schedule that changes from week to week, it's probably going to be difficult for you to do well in in-person classes, in online classes, because there is still a regular weekly schedule for all of these courses. In this way, we hope to expand and offer Mt. Sac courses to other students that currently aren't being served by what we offer here. So general framework, what we've done and what faculty are working on and have worked very hard for the past few years to build is we faculty set out, here's our course, let's split this up into set competencies. Let's split this up into what a student needs to get out of this course to say, I have successfully mastered the material here. I have the knowledge, I have the skills, I have learned what I need to learn from that course.

Again, these are the same courses that we currently offer. This is not a different course. This is not a different level of understanding. It's not a different level of rigor. It's the same classes, just in a different modality. Then once students do show that they have mastered their learning, that's the direct assessment part of it. Uh, once faculty have assessed that, yes, this student has met the requirements, they understand what they need to know, they've come out with the skills they need at the end of this course, then Again, they have now passed the class, they earn their credits, they move on. We build in multiple assessment attempts for this, multiple ways for students to show that they have this understanding, they have the knowledge necessary.

And the way we have set up this program, essentially the, the passing level is equivalent to what would be a B level for a course. So 80% counts as mastery. A-level work counts as mastery plus right now is what we're calling it. Means sort of the higher level understanding for this class. So sometimes people hear this direct assessment idea and they hear, well, you're just taking a test and that's it. And thinking that this is less rigorous or is a lower level course or anything like that. It's really not. This is in a lot of ways a higher level of rigor for these classes because we are requiring a B to pass essentially instead of requiring Cs.

But built into this, we're also offering extra support. We're also offering multiple attempts. So the goal here is to have students that really fully understand this course and are not just sliding by and kind of make it. At the end, they understand what they need to understand from that class. So how we got here. So this started off from a chancellor's office grant that started in 2021, I believe, maybe 2020, I don't remember. I don't know exactly which date that was, to create these direct assessment CBE programs at community colleges. There are colleges across the country already that do CBE, that do teach in this modality, but they aren't community colleges and they aren't in California.

So that's the goal here is to expand these types of offerings to community colleges. Mount Sac was one of the 8 program or 8 colleges selected for this program. The other 7 are also at various points in progress of building these programs. Two have launched already fully, that's Coastline and Southwestern have their programs up and running, and Shasta is very close as well. But all along what this program has really been is faculty-led. That's another piece of sort of misunderstanding that sometimes happens here is thinking this is administration telling us we need to do this and telling us that we must build this program. This was faculty stepping up and faculty saying, this seems like a good program, this seems like something that would help us, this seems like a great place for kinesiology to be involved. And so we got involved to build these programs.

Do you wanna talk about the kinesiology part about this?

Sure, hi everyone. So the degree was chosen because for a variety of reasons, one of which are the biggest reason is because it allows for about 38 different career paths. So while finishing this degree, students can go on and finish a variety of different things, right? They can be a trainer, they can be a coach, they can be an instructor. There's all kinds of ways that a student can utilize this degree. Also, the time constraint for some of these careers— when a student goes on to become a physical therapist, let's use that as an example, they have to get their doctorate in order to practice. So this just gives them a little bit of a head start, if you will, just so that they can get some of the schooling done ahead of time or a little bit faster because they'll have a long time in in college. So that's one of the reasons. The other one was just it's a pretty popular degree on our campus.

So for us, it seems like it suits the needs of the students that we come across. So that's basically why it was chosen. There's obviously a lot of different degrees that are exceptional on this campus, but for the pilot, we just decided this one just, just for those reasons.

And one of the, the other reasons that this this particular program was chosen is that when we looked at the students that are in the kinesiology major, there are not many students over the age of 30. And a CBE program like this tends to be very popular with older adults, because you've got a lot going on. You have the rest of your life, you have maybe kids, you have jobs, you have all the things that are going on that make attending a class every single week may be more difficult. So CBE programs tend to draw in students from those areas. So having a degree like kinesiology where there aren't that many current Mt. Sac older students in these degrees is a way to hopefully not just shift our enrollment from traditional courses to CBE courses, but instead to increase enrollment to again reach the students that we're not currently serving. So timeline, progress, where we are. So the original grant started in 2001.

We applied for this program, we were selected, uh, we selected kinesiology as this degree, and then we've been working ever since to start building this. Building a CBE program, we have learned, is very hard. There's a lot that needs to happen in order to do this because there's a lot of structural things in a college campus that need to be done differently for a CBE program because of the time flexibility, because of the way credits are given, because of that flexibility for students means you have to have a lot of flexibility in your program design too. And that's something we've been working very hard on for the last 5 years now. So some of that is designing competencies. That's the piece that faculty have been heavily involved in, both kinesiology faculty and general education faculty. We are working towards having a full set of GE courses along with this. So this will be a full CBE degree that students can hopefully complete the entire thing in the CBE modality.

Pieces of this project also involve lots of administrative approval at various levels. Some of that was accreditation. We received our ACCJC accreditation approval in 2022. And then a second piece of approval that needs to happen is the Department of Ed. That was a second big hurdle for us, especially because our application was in at the same time the Department of Ed was in massive cuts. So a lot of our applications went to people that were no longer at the Department of Ed or even offices that no longer existed in the Department of Ed. But we have our approval. We are fully approved to offer these courses now.

We've also built in some administrative pieces here at Mt. SAC that includes the CBE amendment form that is very similar to the distance learning form because again, we're treating CBE as a modality. So just like if you are going to teach your course in an online modality, you submit a distance learning form that is saying how you are going to teach this class online. If you are going to teach your course in a CBE modality, you fill out a very similar form that outlines how are you doing this in CBE modality instead. We received in November of this past year our Chancellor's Office approval for the whole program that is now saying, yes, you can offer this. Yes, this is courses you can do. And we're now building courses. Faculty from all the GE areas and in kinesiology are currently building Canvas courses to be able to launch this in fall.

That is our current goal is to be up and running in fall of 2026. The Canvas shells where we have a template built by Eva, who's also here. Yeah, Eva worked very hard to build some really nice templates so that the goal here is to make the program sort of flow well from one course to another. Because students are enrolled in this program, they're enrolled in this, this, this set of courses. We can have them have similar looks, we can have them have similar terminology, we can have them sort of flow well from one to another to not have drastic changes from one course to another of what things look like and how things work?

So because CBE is self-paced, largely self-paced by the student, even though there are recommended timelines, it's that much more important for the structure of the course to be, I guess, consistent. Consistency helps students to orient, and they don't have to, you know, spend time trying to figure out like, oh, this is a new course, new professor, how does this professor do it? The template was created with a certain amount of consistency in the— in terms of the look and feel and some general structure, but while still allowing flexibility for each faculty member to modify the template to their course content depending on what assessments they're using and how they want to assess their students with both formative and summative assessments. Another thing I I also was considering was I know that asynchronous online courses have lower pass rates and higher drop rates because it's easier for students to feel like they're on their own and they don't, you know, have a connection to the professor and the students like they do in an in-person course. So in a CBE program where it's largely self-paced by the student, it is that much more important to include humanizing elements and RSI high-touch elements to help students remember that they're not alone, they have support from their professor, and I'm sure you'll get to the, the coaches component of it. A couple things I wanted to add.

Yeah, I mean, the goal is get rid of the, the bumps that a student might experience that aren't related to learning. Like if you're just struggling because you switch class and now everything's set up differently and everything looks different and everything's named differently, like that, that's an extra bump that a student needs to get past, that if we can avoid that, that sounds great. I think faculty have also said they appreciate the templates so that they are set and they are sort of similar and they have those similar features to them. And I would also add, as Eva sort of said, that this is not us saying here's how you have to teach your course. This is just here's a place you can put all your things of how you are going to teach it. That's a big big piece of this all along is that all the decisions of how a course is going to be taught, of what the competencies will be, of what these courses should include, all of that is completely run by the faculty in that area. That's not something that we are telling anyone, here's how you must teach your class. The people teaching the class are the experts in that, and they decide how they're teaching their class and what that looks like.

So other pieces of this that are very different and also I think are helpful for students, but are also a big shift and change. One of them is the way we're setting up the finances for this. We're building this as a subscription model. So this is a set— you are, if you are signing up for a half-time student or a full-time student are your two options. If you are signing up as a half-time student, then you are saying you are going to complete at least 6 credits per term. That is how they will meet their requirements for financial aid. That's how they will complete their requirements for the satisfactory academic progress and all of those pieces, or they can decide to be a full-time student— means they're signing on that they're going to complete 12 credits per term. But the way we're setting up the payment is, as the subscription model, students can take extra classes.

That's— this is not a minimum maximum number of credits they can complete, it's the minimum number of credits that they say they're going to complete. Complete. So if a student signs on as a half-time student and they've completed their 6 credits and they've finished those courses and they finish them early and they want to keep going and start completing competencies for the next class, they can do that with the same pricing. Same thing for full-time students. There's not a limit of what you can eventually accomplish in that semester, again making this as flexible as possible. That's one of the exciting things about competency-based education to me, is that that flexibility means it is useful for students who need to go slower, but it's also useful for students who are able to go faster, or able to go faster at that time even, because it can be adjustable. I'll talk about the calendar in a bit. CBE calendar is going to be different than our standard academic calendar.

Again, a big goal of that is flexibility with multiple start times. So students will essentially pay per term. They will have 3 terms per year. We don't have the short summer and winter like we will in the traditional calendar. Instead, it'll be 3 16-week terms instead. Let's talk about the calendar. Calendar again is different. The goal here is to allow students multiple start times so that if a student decides to join this program after the semester starts.

It doesn't mean they need to wait in the full 16 weeks till the next term begins. So we have 3 15-week terms— sorry, 15, I keep saying 16, I'm used to the regular semester— 3 15-week terms. And when a student starts, like if the student starts, say, August 22nd, 2027, for this calendar that's listed here, they're in Track 1. Here is their first 15-week term. There's a break for winter, then they start their next 15-week term. There'll be another short break and then their third 15-week term of the year. A student that started later— if instead of starting in August, a student comes to us late September and wants to join this program, they can have their first start date be on October 3rd instead. They will still get 3 15-week terms.

Their terms are just shifted by about 6 weeks because they started 6 weeks later. So again, flexibility is the goal here, allowing students to start when they are able to, allowing students to begin the program without waiting till the end of the semester. Again, adds this extra flexibility for students. Overall, each student is going to have 3 15-week terms per year no matter which track they are in. It's just their tracks may be shifted depending on what time of year they happen to start. And this is something that we worked out with faculty that are involved in CBE programs here at Mt. Sac. We've talked heavily with the, the faculty who are building these courses to see how this works, you know, make sure this is what we want to do.

So this is again not a thing that was just sent down upon us and says this is what it will be. This is what faculty have built towards, is building this model so that we can have flexibility for students and still have a reasonable schedule for faculty at the same time. CBE Amendment Form is another thing that we built. I mentioned that earlier. I want to talk in a little detail for anyone who is working on these CBE programs or CBE courses right now. Again, very similar to the Distance Learning Amendment. It's something that we've gone through the full Academic Senate approval already. And what that form basically does is you are saying how you're going to teach your course in the CBE modality.

You list out, here are the competencies for my course, here are how many credits they should be worth. And then as a student completes competencies, they are completing the credits for that eventual full number of credits for however, however many credits that course should be. So for example, I teach astronomy. If I was building a CBE version of my astronomy 3-credit class, I would split it up into competencies. Each of those competencies would have some credit weight to it. Let's say I split my course into 6 competencies, each one's worth half a credit. Once they've completed all 6 competencies, they will have completed the 3 credits and will have completed that course. So that's what that credit to competency crosswalk is.

We also list contact hour equivalency for that. That was something that was requested by EDC to include, just show showing, yes, we're really teaching these classes. Here's how we are doing them. Here's how we are meeting the requirements of these courses in this different modality. This has gone well so far. We already have a large number of the CBE courses already have CBE amendment forms that are filed, that were submitted, that have already been approved through EDC and CNI. So process is working. Things look good.

I think that's a success that we've had over the past year is getting these approved and in and through. Next, funding model. So that's always a question here is how do we get paid for this? It is also different from regular courses because if you are having students starting joining courses partway through a semester, then your regular funding formula that we do for regular courses doesn't really work. Work. For regular courses, we get paid based on how many students are in that class at census date. That is not how CBE will be funded. Current funding model has been adjusted a few times, but the plan now was set in late fall. The way Mt.

SAC will get paid for these students is they're basically paid once students complete a competency. So rather than in a traditional course the college gets paid when a student enrolls, college will now get paid by the state when a student completes competencies. So it's, it's different. It is a change, and that is still sort of some of those numbers and details are still being worked out. But the, the bonuses that Mt. Sac gets, like we get paid more when students complete programs, when they complete degrees, when they complete certificates, those still happen. We still get those extra payments because of that, and some of that funding model may still change. A big piece of this project is an understanding from everyone involved, from the colleges, the faculty, the state, the creditors, the chancellor's office, everyone, that this is a pilot.

We are learning how to do this, and we are figuring out what this should look like and figuring out how this should work. So that funding model may still change as colleges are now in the, the place where they are really implementing this and have enrolled students. Program map. So again, we have a full degree built out here, or at least close to it. We have the, the hope of a full degree at this point. There are some classes that we're still looking for faculty to get involved in. There's some areas we're still missing here, but what this program map looks like— so this would be for a full-time student. If a student is full-time each term and they complete 12 credits each term except for the last one and complete 13, it means they can complete this full degree in 5 terms.

Each term's only 15 weeks, so it means they are completing this full program just a little less than 2 years. So that's one of the goals here, is to be able to help students that can go fast, help students that can complete this degree quickly, to complete their degree quickly and be done in less than 2 years. For a part-time student, that of course takes longer. This course ordering will be set for students. They aren't choosing which class they are taking when. This is being presented to them— here are your courses, essentially. And this was done in a thoughtful way. This is not just we picked out of a hat of which course should go first.

We're trying to build a program that students students are learning things in the beginning of the program that will then help them later on. So for part-time students, if you're completing either 6 or 7 credits per term total overall, that means it takes you 9 terms to complete the full program, which basically means 3 years. Since we have 3 terms per calendar year, it means 3 years to complete the program if you are a half-time student. That's sort of where we are right now. That's what we've completed and what we're done with and what we have decided and the things that have been sort of checked off on the list of what needs to be done to be able to actually offer these courses. The big final approval that we are still, um, have not completed yet is the sort of second Department of Ed approval, and that's to be able to offer financial We've been approved by the Department of Education to offer these courses and offer this program and offer CBE courses, but we can't currently offer financial aid for it. We have a tentative approval for this. We've been— the Department of Ed in this process has sort of a, a back and forth process.

You submit your application, they come back with questions, you answer those questions, you submit again, they come back with more questions as sort of an informal review. We have completed that and we've been approved for that. So the last piece is to do the actual formal submission of that, to actually turn it in. Here's our final answers. We already have the approval that yes, it will be approved once we submit it. So we're working with financial aid right now to figure out when that timing should be of when we should be submitting this to go through and get it approved. So I think we are nearing the point where that Department of Ed financial aid approval is sort of a formality of we need to submit it and they need to say yes, but we've already essentially been told yes, we will be approved. Uh, next big piece is developing the courses in Canvas.

That's what the CBE faculty are working hard at right now, building their content in Canvas, building in these courses, building up what students will need to they need to learn in order to take their assessments, and then what those assessments need to look like to show that they have learned what they need to learn to show that they have completed those courses. So that's ongoing right now, and again, building towards launching in fall. One of the other checks that we need to complete is a piece of the Chancellor's Office grant towards this, and that is sort of showing that yes, we have Canvas courses built, yes, we have Canvas courses that work. That will happen in the next about a month, we will be submitting those, uh, the Canvas courses that are done to show that yes, we're making progress, and that comes with more grant funding. We need to get this program added to the college catalog. That's something that we are working on now of what that looks like so that it is in the catalog, it is official, and it is ready to go for fall. Next big piece to work on is the faculty agreement of what this looks like contractually, because things are going to be different. The way you are teaching a class is different.

Your timing is different. Your workload is different. This teaching a CBE course is not going to be the same as teaching a regular traditional course. Some of that is the flexibility for students means faculty need to be flexible for them. If a student is moving quicker through your course, you will have students that are farther along in the class while others are moving slower and are at earlier stages. So as a faculty member, you'll essentially be helping students that are at all sorts of different places in your course all at the same time. So there's an understanding here that this is a different kind of work than teaching a regular traditional class will be. So the Faculty Association right now is in the beginning talks of what this pay model should look like, and that negotiation is ongoing at this point.

And then IT integration. Every one of these pieces of flexibility for students means we need to change what the IT structure really looks like. That means registration is run differently. That means how students sign up for classes is different. How students get their financial aid is different. How students receive counseling is different. Every piece of this needs to be done in a little different way for these CBE students. So we're working on that now, of building up what this needs to be to be supportive of students to help them be successful and work their way through these programs.

Thank you for listening to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast, brought to you by Mount Mount Sac's POD Office and created in partnership with Avant Haüs Media. Original music created and edited by Nira Azira. Be sure to check out our growing library of over 230 episodes and let us know your thoughts. You can reach me, Chisa Uyeki, at [email protected]. Wishing you an amazing year and happy listening.