Serendipity35

A buzzworthy term recently has been competency-based education and degrees. They are seen as one  way to award degrees based on testing and portfolios rather than "seat-time" in a traditional course.

Paul LeBlanc is the president of Southern New Hampshire University which has become a leading proponent of this approach and the university started last year a competency-based degree program. It is called College for America and enrolled about 2,000 students.

Here is a video interview with LeBlanc conducted in The Chronicle's offices talking about his vision of competency-based education and what has surprised him from his college's own experiment.