Connecting workers to credentials: The promise and pitfalls of awarding academic credit for prior learning

The practice of awarding academic credit for learning gained outside the classroom is not new. For decades, postsecondary institutions have established credit equivalency for skills or experience students have gained elsewhere. Add to this the longstanding practice of awarding academic credit via the Defense Activities Non-traditional Education Support (DANTES) system, or the College Level Examination Program (CLEP), and it becomes clear that postsecondary institutions, to various degrees, have long been attempting to avoid penalizing students by requiring them to sit through courses that they may have already mastered.
What is new for postsecondary institutions, however, is the rapid growth of this practice. One indication has been the evolution in the terminology used to refer to the practice, reflecting the debates around competency-based assessment that have expanded commensurate with the growth in its use: prior-learning assessment, most frequently associated with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning's Learning-Counts.org initiative, gave way to competency-based education as the term du jour among proponents. More recently still, direct assessment more closely reflects the current discussions, as well as the direction in which the practice appears to be heading.