Competency Based Learning Quotes

A child's readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence:6 1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful. 2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure. 3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective. 4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control. 5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others. 6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults. 7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own needs with those of others in group activity. Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first day of kindergarten with these capabilities depends greatly on how much her parents—and preschool teachers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a "Heart Start," the emotional equivalent of the Head Start programs.

The faculty and students share ownership of the learning outcomes; the students assume responsibility for their learning, and the faculty assumes responsibility for providing appropriate resources for that learning.

Even if the initial home-base advantage is hard to sustain, a global strategy can contribute to supplementing and upgrading it. A good example is in consumer electronics, where Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, and other Japanese firms initially competed on cost in selling simply designed, portable televisions. As they began penetrating foreign markets, they gained economies of scale and further reduced cost by moving down the learning curve. Worldwide volume then helped to support aggressive investments in marketing, new production equipment, and R&D and to achieve proprietary technology.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

We teach children to think and decide for themselves, not just pass exams,’ she says first off. ‘Education here is about developing the social and cognitive competencies of a child and experience-based learning. We encourage them to be critical towards the system.’ She tells me that education and democracy have been tied together in Denmark since the Second World War: ‘Children started to be encouraged to think and go against authority if they didn’t agree with what they were being told – this became a priority after the German occupation of Denmark and was something Danes were very conscious of. We wanted citizens who were democratic and could have their own ideas, so self-development is a big part of learning in Denmark.’ ‘So Hitler drove the Danes to teach their schoolkids to question authority?’ ‘Pretty much.

Here is a checklist for helping your students maintain and boost their motivation. Relate each item to the key motivators of agency (A), relatedness (R) and competence (C). Some items may be a mixture of more than one motivator. 1 Encourage students to get to know each other and talk to each other about their lives and what matters to them. Join in yourself. 2 Suggest they keep a learning journal in which they reflect on what they have learnt,  what activities they have liked or disliked, what is affecting their learning. 3 Allow class time for them to report on their learning to a partner or in small groups 4 Exploit the motivational tools that accompany course books, such as progress tests, ‘can do’ self-evaluative checklists and CEF-based portfolios. There is more on this in the section on coaching with a course book. 5 Wherever possible give your students a choice of what they do in class and for homework (whatever their age!), either as a group by voting for one activity which everyone will do or allowing them individually to choose different activities. 6 Help students set goals for themselves, as a group and individually. Encourage them to write these down and check their progress. 7 Offer your students the opportunity to prepare for an external exam which relates to their needs, such as the Trinity GESE exams for spoken English or the Cambridge ESOL exams. 8 Ask your students how they are feeling about their English on a regular basis. Ask them where their motivation levels are from one week to the next. Get them to ask each other. Be a role model by paying attention to your own motivation!

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

Business leadership is based on two elements: vision and technical competence. Top people in a given industry always embody at least one of those two elements. Sometimes, but rarely, they embody both of them. Simply put, vision is the ability to see what other people don’t. It’s a Ford executive named Lee Iacocca realizing that a market existed for an automobile that was both a racing car and a street vehicle—and coming up with the Mustang. It’s Steven Jobs realizing that computers needed to be sold in a single box, like a television sets, instead of piece by piece. About one hundred years ago, Walter Chrysler was a plant manager for a locomotive company. Then he decided to go into the car business, which was a hot new industry at the time. The trouble was, Walter Chrysler didn’t know a lot about cars, except that they were beginning to outnumber horses on the public roadways. To remedy this problem, Chrysler bought one of the Model T Fords that were becoming so popular. To learn how it worked, he took it apart and put it back together. Then, just to be sure he understood everything, he repeated this. Then, to be absolutely certain he knew what made a car work, he took it apart and put it together forty-eight more times, for a grand total of fifty. By the time he was finished, Chrysler not only had a vision of thousands of cars on American highways, he also had the mechanical details of those cars engraved in his consciousness. Perhaps you’ve seen the play called The Music Man. It’s about a fast-talking man who arrives in a small town with the intention of hugely upgrading a marching band. However, he can’t play any instruments, doesn’t know how to lead a band, and doesn’t really have any musical skills whatsoever. The Music Man is a comedy, but it’s not totally unrealistic. Some managers in the computer industry don’t know how to format a document. Some automobile executives could not change a tire. There was once even a vice president who couldn’t spell potato. It’s not a good idea to lack the fundamental technical skills of your industry, and it’s really not a good idea to get caught lacking them. So let’s see what you can do to avoid those problems.

Switch from a Performance Focus to a Mastery Focus There’s a way to keep your standards high but avoid the problems that come from perfectionism. If you can shift your thinking from a performance focus to a mastery focus, you’ll become less fearful, more resilient, and more open to good, new ideas. Performance focus is when your highest priority is to show you can do something well now. Mastery focus is when you’re mostly concerned with advancing your skills. Someone with a mastery focus will think, “My goal is to master this skill set” rather than “I need to perform well to prove myself.” A mastery focus can help you persist after setbacks. To illustrate this, imagine the following scenario: Adam is trying to master the art of public speaking. Due to his mastery goal, he’s likely to take as many opportunities as he can to practice giving speeches. When he has setbacks, he’ll be motivated to try to understand these and get back on track. His mastery focus will make him more likely to work steadily toward his goal. Compare this with performance-focused Rob, who is concerned just with proving his competence each time he gives a talk. Rob will probably take fewer risks in his style of presentation and be less willing to step outside his comfort zone. If he has an incident in which a talk doesn’t go as well as he’d hoped, he’s likely to start avoiding public speaking opportunities. Mastery goals will help you become less upset about individual instances of failure. They’ll increase your willingness to identify where you’ve made errors, and they’ll help you avoid becoming so excessively critical of yourself that you lose confidence in your ability to rectify your mistakes. A mastery focus can also help you prioritize—you can say yes to things that move you toward your mastery goal and no to things that don’t. This is great if you’re intolerant of uncertainty, because it gives you a clear direction and rule of thumb for making decisions about which opportunities to pursue. Experiment: What’s your most important mastery goal right now? Complete this sentence: “My goal is to master the skills involved in ___.” Examples include parenting, turning more website visitors into buyers, property investment, or self-compassion. Based on the mastery goal you picked, answer the following questions. Make your answers as specific as possible. How would people with your mastery goal: 1. React to mistakes, setbacks, disappointments, and negative moods? 2. Prioritize which tasks they work on? What types of tasks would they deprioritize? 3. React when they’d sunk a lot of time into something and then realized a particular strategy or idea didn’t have the potential they’d hoped it would? 4. Ensure they were optimizing their learning and skill acquisition? 5. React when they felt anxious?

Be aware that unconscious competence is where some people start from, and it’s dangerous because they typically make terrible teachers because of their inability to explain their reasoning not based on a gut feeling. The levels of competency and creating intuition mirror the true learning process in a nutshell: Try Achieve or fail If you fail, analyze failure Go to step one. Where this process can go wrong is the following: Try Achieve or fail If you fail, analyze failure incorrectly or fail to correct actions. Go to step one.

Numerous state and federal policymakers are increasingly embracing competency-based learning. In a competency-based system, students advance upon demonstrating mastery. This model marks a sharp departure from the school system's traditional metric: hours spent in the classroom.

there may be marked differences among various sectors with regard to their knowledge base. Some science-intensive sectors base their activities mainly on codified knowledge, while others operate and compete mainly on the basis of unstructured and experience-based implicit knowledge. But there are no pure cases. Even in the most strongly science-based sectors, tacit knowledge will be a key element in their competitive position, and conversely, it is difficult to find firms in the OECD area that can avoid completely the need to codify.

Sometimes when counselees are cornered and forced to acknowledge that their behavior is irresponsible, they attempt to dodge the issue by replying: “Well, I guess that’s just the way I am.” They say this in a resigned manner and expect to leave the whole matter right there. They speak as though there were no possibility for genuine personality change. Such a view of man is decidedly unscriptural. Human beings in one way might be described more accurately as human becomings. Personality can be changed. God, throughout history, has turned Jacobs into Israels, Simons into Peters and Sauls into Pauls. Today’s personality is based on yesterday. What one is today is but the composite of his past. At birth, God gave to each of us a basic deposit of inherited stuff which Scripture calls phusis (nature). This is a matter of gene makeup. 1 But that is not personality. How one uses the phusis in responding to life’s problems and life’s challenges determines the personality. Those response patterns may become deeply etched over a period of time. At length, they may seem to be, as we say, “second nature,” i.e., almost as “given” as the original phusis. Though habit patterns are hard to change, change is not impossible. Nouthetic counselors regularly see patterns of 30-40 years’ duration altered. What was learned can be unlearned.

The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning. The cultures of sciences and engineering used to embrace Enlightenment epistemology, but now they have been overridden by horribly regressive BUMMER epistemology. You probably know the word “meme” as meaning a BUMMER posting that can go viral. But originally, “meme” suggested a philosophy of thought and meaning. The term was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process. Thus some fashions, ideas, and habits take hold, while others become extinct. The concept of memes provides a way of framing everything non-nerds do—the whole of humanities, culture, arts, and politics—as similar instances of meme competition, mere subroutines of a higher-level algorithm that nerds can master. When the internet took of, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies. There was a ubiquitous genre of internet appreciation from the very beginning in which someone would point out the viral spread of a meme and admire how cute that was. The genre exists to this day. Memes started out as a way of expressing solidarity with a philosophy I used to call cybernetic totalism that still underlies BUMMER. Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers.

Pilot test your training to determine an optimal amount of practice to reach acceptable job competence. As you plan your practice activities, find ways to spread them over a lesson or course. Spaced practice results in better long-term learning with a high effect size of 0.71.

Four months later, I got my diagnosis. And now that my past was spilling over, exploding, a volcano spewing hot toxic waste all over my present life, it was all I could think about. I sent my father an email with the subject line FINALLY GOT AN OFFICIAL DIAGNOSIS. In the body of the email, I attached a link to the Wikipedia page for complex PTSD. At the time, the Wikipedia page read, “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.” And then, a paragraph down: “C-PTSD is a learned set of responses, and a failure to compete numerous important development tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. Unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological, not DNA based, it is a disorder caused by lack of nurture.” A lack of nurture. I didn’t write a hello in the body of the email. I didn’t include a sign-off. All I included in the vast expanse of white space was the link. What I didn’t write, but what was implied, what I hoped to convey: You ruined my life. You ruined my life. You ruined my life.

The ETX-90 sells for about $400 and comes with an Autostar computerized controller and a tripod. This instrument automatically points at almost any object you specify if that object is in view from your location at that time. The Autostar can even find moving objects, such as planets, based on stored information, and it’s equipped to give you a “tour” of the best sights in the sky, selected with no input from you. A good competing telescope for the ETX-90 is the Celestron SkyProdigy 90. It’s comparably sized and equipped and has the capability to automatically align itself on the sky, after which it points to almost any celestial object that you select. It goes for about $600. You definitely don’t want to spend this much money on a telescope until you see the same model in action at an astronomy club observing meeting or a star party (see Chapter 2). But the price is no more than you pay for a fine camera and an accessory lens or two. You can find larger telescopes for less money — check the ads in current issues of astronomy magazines — but you have to invest much more effort in learning to use them effectively. Some brand-name telescopes are sold through authorized dealers that tend to have expert knowledge. But take their advice with just a wee bit of salt. Here are some key websites to browse for telescope product information:

Technically, it is correct that extinction can’t be used to help people cope with problems that are not based on learning because what it does is induce new learning that competes with the original learning. But

Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of the grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience. Based on a massive study, Dr. Chetty testified that a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings per classroom. Based on a 4 year study, Dr. Kane testified that students in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] who are taught by a teacher in the bottom 5% of competence lose 9.54 months of learning in a single year compared to students with average teachers.20

In a personalized learning environment, learners demonstrate mastery based on a competency-based model, not on seat time. In this learning environment, teachers are expected to help all learners succeed in mastering skills. Competency-based pathways are a re-engineering of our education system around learning. It is a re-engineering designed for success where failure is no longer an option.

Personalized learning means learners... •    know how they learn best. •    are co-designers of the curriculum and the learning environment. •    have flexible learning anytime and anywhere. •    have a voice in and choice about their learning. •    have quality teachers who are partners in learning. •    use a competency-based model to demonstrate mastery. •    self-direct their learning. •    design their learning path for college and career.

What you know is more important than where or how you learned it.” Little

Over the generations they came to understand that children are drawn into the experience of social membership and participation not by being removed from their communities but by being immersed in the world of adults. They understood that children are motivated to master new knowledge and skills because doing so allows them to display their competence and make contributions to the lives of those they love and respect. Learning in such settings took place within a rich social and natural context that made its significance self-evident. Adults

Experience suggests that these teams must be given radical goals, like collapsing time in half. Otherwise, assumptions aren’t challenged. The whole premise is using bottlenecks, breakdowns, and unmet customer needs as opportunities to learn. The teams use a variety of techniques—root-cause analysis, scenario building, pursuing conflict between two people until the real problem crystalizes, and old-fashioned imagination. Between regular meetings, research into technical or other problems is done. There are no formal reports to the team members’ superiors. The teams report to a senior steering group that is responsible for all the breakthrough teams operating. This steering group is responsible for managing change under the time-based vision that the management team has decided to pursue.

We teach children to think and decide for themselves, not just pass exams,’ she says first off. ‘Education here is about developing the social and cognitive competencies of a child and experience-based learning. We encourage them to be critical towards the system.’ She tells me that education and democracy have been tied together in Denmark since the Second World War: ‘Children started to be encouraged to think and go against authority if they didn’t agree with what they were being told – this became a priority after the German occupation of Denmark and was something Danes were very conscious of. We wanted citizens who were democratic and could have their own ideas, so self-development is a big part of learning in Denmark.

Societies that have successfully coped with moral diversity at one level may well be those that can continue expanding their moral networks because they have achieved wider-based, more impartial, justification. In 'climbing the ladder' of wider appeal in a diverse society, they have crafted their rules to accommodate greater diversity. Note here that the very justificatory competency that is critical to a stable shared moral rule also can be employed to undermine the current rule and move to a new publicly justified rule. Justification must be able to perform this destabilizing role of a cooperative moral system is to learn and adapt. A recent analyses such as Haidt's, Stanford's, and DeScioli and Kurzban's have recognized, any adequate account of morality must be able to induce change as well as provide stability. Moral diversity and conflict may be an engine of moral reform, pointing toward a new cooperative equilibrium. On the other hand, we should expect continued conflict on many matters, 'As moral projects climb the ladder to broader audiences (being recast and potentially applied to increasingly broader sets of individuals), any given individual will be bombarded with increasing numbers of candidate moral rules.

The key to Amazon is its increasingly digital operating model. Amazon’s operating philosophy centers on digitizing the best understanding of operational excellence through the broad-based application of artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced robotics, and the instantiation of as much know-how as possible into software.

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

more recent research, evidence shows that these competency areas pertaining to the domains of social and emotional learning (SEL) have, in fact, become of paramount importance in an individual’s learning and development, leading to his/her own well-being as well as the development of sustainable societies. Further, these competencies are identified to be essential for effective leadership (Taylor, 2018) and are shown to enhance and ‘brighten up’ the development of cognitive domain capabilities.

In relation to these learning styles, psychologists have also identified other associated psychological, neurological, and personality characteristics. The students with preferences for the auditory-sequential learning style are more inclined to have extrovert personalities, while the students who prefer the visual-spatial learning style are inclined to possess introvert personalities. Extrovert personalities are more outgoing, engage in discussions, and respond easily, even with relatively unknown people, and they enjoy social activities with a large number of participants. On the contrary, introverts prefer attending to things on their own with less interaction with others, especially with relatively unknown people, and dislike social activities with large attendance. Auditory-sequential learners are good in analysis and pay more attention to specific detail; they approach solving a complex problem by dividing it into smaller parts. On the other hand, visual-spatial learners are good synthesisers, who can relate different perspectives to form an answer and are better at seeing the big picture or are holistic. As we would expect, auditory-sequential learners deal better with the concept of time and are better organised, while visual-spatial learners are relatively less competent with the concept of time. Auditory-sequential learners think in words and are better in rote memorisation; visual-spatial learners think in pictures and need to relate contextual meanings with pictures and, as a result, struggle with rote memorisation. That is, auditory-sequential learners have better auditory short-term memory, while visual-spatial learners have better visual long-term memory. Further, since they think in pictures, visual-spatial learners take a relatively longer time to process and relate information to contexts; once they do that, this contextual information is retained longer in memory.

mindfulness/attention training practices are identified as the key to enabling the development of emotional intelligence competencies leading to learning and development to higher levels of self-actualisation/self-transcendence.

Competency-Based Learning ensures learners develop specific skills efficiently, progressing at their own pace in personalized journeys designed to foster comprehensive mastery.

Competency-Based Learning tailors skill development, enabling learners to progress at their own pace for efficient and comprehensive mastery.

Quick Mastery programs facilitate rapid proficiency, allowing participants to swiftly become adept in a particular skill or subject matter.

In a 2023 report presented to Congress, the Congressional Research Service explained: “Deepfakes are often described as forgeries created using techniques in machine learning (ML) — a subfield of AI — especially generative adversarial networks (GANs). In the GAN process, two ML systems, called neural networks, are trained in competition with each other. The first network, or the generator, is tasked with creating counterfeit data — such as photos, audio, recordings, or video footage — that replicate the properties of the original data set. The second network, or the discriminator, is tasked with identifying the counterfeit data. Based on the results of each iteration, the generator networks continue to compete — often for thousands or millions of iterations — until the generator improves its performance such that the discriminator can no longer distinguish between real and counterfeit data.

The Blasphemy of Reason To understand the relationship between Islamic and scientific modes of thought, it's useful to contrast the emergence of Islam with that of Christianity. In its first four centuries, Christianity germinated gradually within the Roman Empire, with many of its leading theologians converting to the new religion only after having spent their formative years immersed in the classical learning of ancient Greece. Islam, by contrast, spread through military conquest, expanding mostly through conversion of conquered peoples. As a result, even when Muslim rulers welcomed classical Greek knowledge, it was perceived as something alien. Tellingly, Greek science and natural philosophy were known throughout Islam as the “foreign sciences,” in contrast to the “Islamic sciences,” such as the study of the Quran, which were considered to hold the highest place in Muslim life.9 In the early years of Islamic civilization, various groups vigorously competed for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community. Those who actively pursued the Greek classical tradition of knowledge were known as the faylasuf or “philosophers.” Another group, taking a more mystical approach to Islam, were the Sufis. However, the two principal groups that emerged were the Ash'arites, traditionalists who believed in the primacy of Islamic faith, and the Mu'tazilites, who believed in a rational explication of the Quran.10 The Mu'tazilites were devout followers of Islam, while applying rational thought to their interpretation of theology. When passages in the Quran referred to “the face of God” or described God sitting on his throne, the Mu'tazilites argued that these descriptions should be interpreted metaphorically. It seemed to them equally valid to use reason as theology to make important distinctions in their lives, such as between good and evil. The Ash'arites, on the other hand, based their viewpoint on the fundamental presumption that the Quran was the direct word of God transmitted through Muhammad. As such, they viewed the Quran as something eternal and uncreated, an indivisible part of God: it wasn't just the word of God; it literally was God. How, then, to interpret statements about God's face or God sitting on his throne? The Ash'arite position was to take these statements literally, and if reason were unable

So it seems that the core of the enlightenment, as declared by Immanuel Kant, is still the basis for education: Enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from her self-imposed immaturity. (Kant, 1784) A democracy (and the self-determination of the people in a community) can only function if the people involved in this process have the skills and competencies to act maturely in the spirit of Kant.

If our parents didn't speak to us when we were very small, the opportunity to enter the world of language would close. There are reports from various countries and at various times of children who were found running wild. They learnt to survive by running and hunting with dogs or wolves, but they couldn't speak and it was very difficult for them to learn to speak. The fact that we can speak is based on the fact of parents and friends talking with us; without them we would be empty; we are filled with them and this is amazing. Gratitude starts to dissolve the barrier of duality; without you there is no me. 'I am me because I am not you!' is our ordinary ego position: I am who I am. But what do we have? Language. We were invited into it by people repeatedly speaking to us when we were small, and kindly correcting our grammar and vocabulary. The teachers at school helped us to learn to read and write and not to make our notebooks such a mess. The competencies that we now have were transmitted to us; we become ourselves through the other.

Competent among own people, kind with other people, wickedly-clever always towards evil people, loving towards good people, arrogant with base people, guileless with learned people, courageous against enemies, forgiving towards elders, and cunning with women; in these arts, that man who is skilful, in him the regard of the people is established.

Technical competence: Are you expanding and refining your skill base? Management competence: Are you regularly upgrading your ability to control and organize the environment for maximum efficiency? Technological competence: Are you keeping up-to-date on ways to adapt technology to do your job faster and cheaper or to improve customer and employee satisfaction? Leadership competence: Are you continuing to learn more about the fine art of leading others?

In a 2009 paper, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) described skills and competencies that young people require in order to benefit from and contribute to a rapidly changing world. The OECD distinguishes these by defining skills as the ability to perform tasks and solve problems. Skills include critical thinking, responsibility, decision making, and flexibility. They define competencies as the ability to apply skills and knowledge in a specific context such as school or work. The OECD framework for 21st century skills and competencies has three dimensions: Figure 1.2 Center for Public Education Source: Jerald (2009). Used with permission. Information: This dimension includes accessing, selecting, evaluating, organizing, and using information in digital environments. Use of the information involves understanding the relationships between the elements and generation of new ideas. The competencies necessary to effectively use information include research and problem-solving skills. Communication: This dimension includes the ability to exchange, critique, and present information, and also the ability to use tools and technologies in a reflective and interactive way. The requisite skills are based on sharing and transmitting information to others. Ethics and Social Impact: This dimension involves a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural implications of technologies, and an awareness of the impact of one’s actions on others and the larger society. Skills and competencies required for this are global understanding and personal responsibility.

We believe that the unsatisfactory direction of innovations would have been changed earlier: •If the users had coordinated their procurement of equipment, •If the users had had a stronger competence in relation to electronics-based regulation systems, and •If the technology had been less systemic and complex.

There was one company—I think it was eMoneyMail—that shut down the company at a conference basically saying that the Internet is not a safe place to conduct transactions. They had 25 percent fraud. So for every $4.00 changing hands in the system, $1.00 was stolen. And it was all coming out of their pocket. They said, "We lost a ton of money," and they just quit. Then, people like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well—they knew from many years of practice that this was going to become a big problem—didn't really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. We started with this, "Fraud is going to kill us. What can we do to save ourselves?" They started from, "We have no fraud. How can we build this and not let any more fraud in?" Which is the wrong position to start because you are limiting your users, and new users learning about a new system really don't want to be restricted. Livingston: Why do you think they thought that way? Levchin: I think there's a very strong power of default where, to them, certain behavior to solve a particular problem is well understood. There are people that make careers out of risk management in big banks. They know that what you do is this and you don't do that. The other part, I think, is that a lot of them are public companies. We didn't go public until we had the fraud thing figured out. Somebody like Citibank or anyone with a substantial public visibility announcing that they are suddenly bleeding out $10 million a month in fraud would send serious shocks through the investor base. But I think, even if they did that, it's likely they wouldn't have been successful because—we had talked to a lot of them both as a potential acquirer and as partnership potential—none of them had actually ever gone to the sort of stuff that we did for our anti-fraud work. The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you've been in the industry for a long time. So we were sort of beneficiaries of our naïveté. We thought, "We don't know how to do this; let's just invent it.