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The Higher Education Act of 1965 is due for reauthorization this year, and direct assessment programs could be in the spotlight. The law, which governs how federal student aid functions, could see some major changes later this year. As part of ongoing discussions for revisiting the act, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation in July that would aid colleges employing competency-based education programs, according to Inside Higher Ed. The educational approach allows students to pursue a degree based on their demonstration of skill mastery instead of their letter grades. The intent is to provide more concrete skills that translate directly to a work environment rather than a theoretical educational approach.

While the number of students taking MOOCs has exploded in the past few years, experts are divided on what impact the courses have had on international education opportunities.

Advocates and creators of massive open online courses – the free courses open to anyone with an Internet connection – have high hopes for how the classes can help those hungry for a U.S.-style education. 

"Over time people began to feel that the excitement was really just hype."

Sometimes potentially “disruptive” approaches to higher education arrive on campuses with little fanfare. And they can become solid additions to traditional colleges rather than an existential threat. Take Kentucky’s two-year college system, which three years ago began an online offering aimed at working adults. The project, dubbed “Learn on Demand,” hits most of the buzzwords du jour, featuring modular courses that lead to stackable credentials, with both self-paced and competency-based elements. All that’s missing is a MOOC.

Roughly 1,000 students are enrolled in Learn on Demand at any one time, according to officials at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Many heard about it by word of mouth, and a growing number of the system’s 33,000 online students have been attracted to the convenience of the classes, which can be broken into modules that take as little as three weeks to complete.

This last decade of the music industry presages the coming decade of education. Choice is expanding at every level, from pre-k to graduate school. The individual course, rather than the degree, is becoming the unit of content. And universities, the record labels of education, are facing increased pressure to unbundle their services. So what will the future of education look like?

The price of content will freefall over the next seven years.

Education will be personalized.

online competency-based education stands out as the innovation most likely to disrupt higher education.

As traditional institutions struggle to innovate from within and other education technology vendors attempt to plug and play into the existing system, online competency-based providers release learning from the constraints of the academy. By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter—these providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market.

The fusion of modularization with mastery-based learning is the key to understanding how these providers can build a multitude of stackable credentials or programs for a wide variety of industries, scale them, and simultaneously drive down the cost of educating students for the opportunities at hand. These programs target a growing set of students who are looking for a different value proposition from higher education—one that centers on targeted and specific learning outcomes, tailored support, as well as identifiable skillsets that are portable and meaningful to employers.