Return to Office and Competency-Based Education: Challenging Old Assumptions

The August 2025 CAVO newsletter ([link to: CAVO Newsletter August 2025-8.19.2025 ]) Return to Office & Accountability: What's Really at Stake? by M. Rawlings) grabbed my attention, as we are seeing this mandate for many employees—and many of them may have gotten really comfortable (and perhaps even moved locations) in the remote environment during and right after the COVID-19 pandemic. And, I’ll be honest, I think in many ways, it doesn’t always make sense. We also see several academic institutions mandating staff, faculty, and students come back to class/buildings, now that the pandemic that forced them out of physical classrooms is a thing of the past…
 

As an educator with about 30 years in learning design--notably in the digital/online space--the conversation around accountability being linked to physically being in a space, as Dr. Rawlings brings up in the CAVO newsletter, made me think about the notion (still fairly pervasive even though research suggests otherwise (Qin, 2025; Soffer & Nachmias, 2018; Stevens et al., 2021) that a good deal of people still believe that students aren’t learning unless they are physically in a classroom—butts in seats, we often hear.
 

Just because a student is physically there does not mean they are mentally present.
Similarly, just because an employee is in the office, this doesn’t mean they are working hard/being productive. This presence equals automatic accountability mindset makes less and less sense, especially as online productivity tools and tools and synchronous connection tools (or asynchronously for that matter) get better and better.
 

This also leads to the idea of contact hours as they related to credit.

Again, the pervasive idea that “seat” time (in this case, physical time in a classroom) is somehow linked to learning seems preposterous to me. Yet, much of academia (and policy) remains bound to this idea. Seat (or contact) time becomes wholly artificial in the asynchronous online space, and, frankly, it’s nonsense that ‘butts in seats’ for a certain amount of time is linked to learning (see Laitinen’s seminal policy paper from 2012, Cracking the Credit Hour.
 

What is the alternative?

Just as employees remain accountable to outcomes and KPIs and other performance measures, students should be accountable to demonstrate levels of learning through intentional assessments. If a student can demonstrate a desired level (proficiency) of learning, through performance, the amount of time spent “learning” the material becomes, well… immaterial.
 

This is the main idea behind Competency Based Education (CBE) (Gonzalez, 2025; William, 2015). CBE approaches place outcomes and student demonstration of outcomes at the center of what determines learning, rather than the amount of time a student spends sitting in a chair and doing homework. Assessment still matters in traditional contact-time models, but academic institutions are still held to a time element to award students credits. CBE says, this student demonstrated they can meet the outcomes in a course; therefore, they should be awarded credits. The amount of time spent, in hours over any given time span (semester), becomes largely irrelevant.
 

Not only does CBE make good sense, it can drastically reduce the cost to students for obtaining a credential or degree. Spend less time demonstrating outcomes, reduce your costs.
 

I’m not suggesting a CBE approach is easy—it’s not. It means radical focus on measurable outcomes, with valid and reliable assessments through which students are able to demonstrate proficiency. (I also fully appreciate that some outcomes need to be demonstrated by physically doing something—i.e., drawing blood, filling a cavity, dancing ballet, etc.).
 

But, just like giving employees the flexibility to demonstrate accountability/productivity at a distance, giving students—especially non-traditional, working and military (our NU Anders)—the flexibility of demonstrating proficiency in given outcomes remotely, we have the opportunity to meet many more students where they are and help get them to that credential or degree they seek, oftentimes much more quickly.

 

References:

Gonzalez, J. (2025, April). A close look at competency-based learning. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/competency-based-learning/

Qin, Y. (2025). Online vs. face-to-face: a long-term study on the effectiveness and essence of learning. Cogent Education, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2025.2554314

Soffer, T., Nachmias, R. (2018, March). Effectiveness of learning in online academic courses compared with face-to-face courses in higher education. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12258

Stevens, G., Bienz, T., Wali, N., Condie, J., Spyros. (2021, October). Online university education is the new normal: but is face-to-face better? Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 18(3): 278–297. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITSE-08-2020-0181

William, A. (2015). Teaching in a digital age: Chapter 4: methods of teaching with an online focus. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/6-6-competency-based-learning/