Perhaps the most watched competency-based experiment is being developed by the University of Wisconsin. “We have between 750,000 and a million people in Wisconsin who have some college but no degree,” almost 20 percent of the population, says the Wisconsin system’s president, Kevin P. Reilly. “According to surveys by our extension department, about 60,000 of them would go back to school right now if they didn’t have to quit their jobs, put their dog into a kennel and move into a dorm to do it.” The U.W. Flexible Option will be mostly online, with some in-person practicums. Students will be charged by three-month “subscription periods” and given access to mentors called “academic success coaches.” The first degrees will come from the Milwaukee and U.W. Colleges campuses.

To explain competency, Aaron Brower, who is leading the program as special assistant to Dr. Reilly, uses an example from one of the programs under development. As part of an associate degree in general studies, a student might be asked to write an essay about the 1920s in response to vintage photographs of the Cotton Club and the Ku Klux Klan. Beyond general knowledge of the era, he says, the exercise tests “the ability to write a story based on historical context” and “the use of source material in a research project.”

Mr. Merisotis of Lumina says that deconstructing curriculum into abstract, interrelated competencies like these is the way of the future for all programs, whether based on assessment or credit hour. “What you’re seeing is a growing recognition that all postsecondary credentials should have competencies that students can demonstrate as a result of their education,” he says.

Frederick M. Hurst, who directs Northern Arizona University’s new Personalized Learning Program, says that competency transcripts do a better job of communicating a graduate’s value to employers. “As an example,” he says, “if you look at someone’s transcript and it says they have three three-hour courses in history, an employer doesn’t know what that means other than someone knows about these time periods in history. If you break it down in a different way and talk about the writing skills that a student got out of those courses, that’s a skill someone will need in the workplace.”

Competency-based innovations, however, are getting some pushback.

“It’s scary for faculty,” Dr. Reilly says. “There’s a continuing sense that students can and do draw on so many sources of information that are now available at their fingertips. They don’t need to come to the monastery for four years and sit at the feet of the monks.”

“Now, I’m an old English professor who taught the Joyce course here at Madison two years ago,” he says. “The idea that you can’t understand Joyce unless you take it from Reilly three hours a week — that we faculty own the knowledge and anyone who’s going to be well educated has to get it from us — the world has changed so much that that’s no longer true.”