7 April 2021: Lessons Learned from Systemically Implementing Competency Based Assessment in First Year Engineering

Presenters: Sean Maw and Shaobo Huang (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)

The College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Canada, is currently redesigning its First Year (FY) program. One key element of that redesign is the adoption of competency based assessment (CBA). It will be implemented across all courses. In the Fall of 2020, in the midst of the COVID crisis, CBA was fully implemented in one of the core FY courses as a pilot.

This presentation discussed key learnings from that pilot exercise. The devil is in the details with CBA, so a detailed description of how CBA was implemented was described including the benefits and costs that were incurred. Impressions that students had, performance metrics from the trial were covered and how that pilot experience is influencing our system-wide roll-out of the system this coming Fall iwas also disucssed. CBA has several attractive benefits but also some significant costs. Its implementation in engineering education is relatively uncommon, and the presentation explored why that is the case.

Further information

• Slide Set: TA_webinar_7_apr_2021_slides.pdf [1.3MB]
• Chat Log including shared links (edited for clarity): TA_webinar_7_apr_2021_chat_log.txt
• Sean's UoS profile.
• Shaobao's UoS profile.

Session Recording

View: Session recording in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra version (includes slides, audio and audience text chat).

View: Session recording on Youtube (slide stream and audio).

Shared links during the session

• UoS engineering program 're-engineered: https://engineering.usask.ca/programs/Academic/re-engineered.php
• Moodle docs on competencies. https://docs.moodle.org/310/en/Competencies