Building the LMS Skills-First Education Actually Needs
Driven by employer demand, workforce shortages, and increasing pressure to demonstrate student outcomes, higher education is taking steps toward skills-first and competency-based learning. The pressure has only intensified following new federal regulations that will tie programs’ access to federal student loans to whether their graduates earn more than comparable workers who did not pursue the credential.
Yet most learning management systems were designed for a very different educational model: one built around semesters, credit hours, and letter grades. As institutions rethink how learning is delivered and measured, a question emerges: What would a learning platform look like if it were designed for competency-based education (CBE) from the ground up?
For the past year, Unicon has been working with Axim Collaborative, the nonprofit that stewards Open edX, the open-source learning platform, alongside the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), to answer that question. With an initial platform for CBE scheduled for release in December 2026, the collaboration has revealed important challenges, insights, and lessons that can be applied not just to this initiative but to skill-forward learning platforms in the future.
One LMS for Diverse Approaches to CBE
Created to support the massive open online course (MOOC) movement, Open edX is now used by governments, universities, nonprofits, and global employers around the world. While it already featured capabilities aligned with competency-based learning, particularly its flexibility and scalability, it wasn’t originally designed for it.
To understand what would be required to create an open-source LMS specifically for CBE, Axim partnered with Unicon to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the platform, identify capability gaps, and help shape a development road map.
The project initially focused on resource-challenged community colleges, many of which face increasing financial pressure while also serving students seeking degrees closely aligned with workforce needs. But the vision quickly expanded beyond other institutional types. The team interviewed faculty members from ten colleges and universities—including community colleges and traditional four-year universities—offering competency-based education (CBE) programs to understand both their technical requirements and operational challenges.
“There is no standard implementation of competency-based education. Every CBE program has a really specific and relatively complicated set of rules. Institutions define mastery differently, assess learners differently, and have different progression requirements. We had to design something complex enough but also flexible enough to support all of those variations.” — Mary Gwozdz, Software Architect at Unicon
However, there were some significant commonalities and agreement on high-priority features.
The first was the need to track competency mastery rather than simply recording grades. Before institutions can personalize learning, issue meaningful credentials, or demonstrate workforce readiness, they need a reliable way to determine whether a learner has actually mastered a competency.
Once mastery can be measured, institutions also need better visibility into learner progress. In fact, progress tracking emerged as one of the most consistent requests during Unicon’s research. Institutions wanted dashboards that show progress toward competencies across courses and programs, giving learners, instructors, advisors, and administrators a much clearer understanding of where support is needed, as well as where students’ learning can be accelerated.
Finally, C-BEN stressed the importance of richer assessment rubrics. While Open edX already supports rubrics, the team is working toward a system that links each assessment criterion directly to a specific competency. This allows instructors to measure mastery of individual skills and reuse those competency-based criteria across assignments and courses.
Identified as essential to making CBE work in practice, most of these became the foundation for the MVP version of the platform, with additional features planned or under consideration for future releases.
The Pros and Cons of Open Source
Open edX’s open-source infrastructure offers several benefits over proprietary SaaS solutions, especially the ability to customize the technology to meet institutional needs and the freedom to innovate, instead of waiting for a vendor to develop requested capabilities. Axim hopes that institutions will collaborate on new features, which can then be adapted for the larger community.
“Open source is free like a puppy, not free like a beer.” — Mary Gwozdz, Software Architect at Unicon
The software itself may be freely available, but institutions still need expertise to deploy, host, customize, and integrate it into their existing technology ecosystems—which requires resources they may not have. That is where Unicon can step in with support for custom feature development, migration planning, hosting and managed services, and integration with skills mobility infrastructure.
Building the Infrastructure for What’s Next
The shift toward skills-first education is changing how institutions assess learning, issue credentials, support learners, and connect education to workforce outcomes. The technology supporting those efforts must evolve as well.
Through our collaboration with Axim Collaborative, C-BEN, and higher education institutions across the country, Unicon is helping to define the infrastructure that can support skills-forward education. While this initial work is focused on Open edX, these lessons extend beyond a single platform. The ultimate goal is to build learning ecosystems flexible enough to adapt to changing learner needs, differing institutional requirements, and an increasingly skills-driven economy.
