In thinking about the recent Scottish referendum on independence from the United Kingdom, it is worth remembering the way the great American poet, Walt Whitman, envisioned democracy.

"We have frequently printed the word Democracy," wrote Whitman. "Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd...a great word, whose history remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted." Whitman, a fan of Abraham Lincoln, may well have had democracy "of the people, by the people, for the people" in mind -- a democracy created by the civic labors of its citizens.

Albeit without thinking much about it, Scotland may have helped to pioneer in the "yet unwritten history" of democracy in the 21st Century.

Many "yes" voters in the campaign are depressed after 55 percent of Scottish voters chose to remain in the United Kingdom with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Fiona Ivanski, a veterinary surgeon who voted for Scottish independence, described "a terrible emptiness" to New York Times reporter Katrin Bennhold, quoted in Bennhold's story about the election. "We got so close, you could almost touch it," said Ivanski.

In most people's minds, "democracy" means elections. The citizen's role is to be an informed voter. Most discussions of Scotland's referendum assume that the moment of vibrant democracy is over.

But there are some like Whitman who see much greater promise in democracy.

"One of the biggest attractions of the Yes campaign...is that it is a grassroots movement of people that has energized us and made us feel democracy could work," wrote Vicky Allan, an Englishwoman in Scotland, in a column in the Herald Scotland before the vote. "You don't have to be a Scot to relate to that."

Allan agreed with my point in an earlier Huffington Post blog that there are limits to electoral politics in generating lasting movements for participatory democracy. She picked up the question I had heard from a young man in the final televised debate between Darling and Salmond, leaders of the "no" and "yes" campaigns: how can the tremendous energy and political interest of the campaign continue? "The answer," Allan replied, "Is [that] it will be up to us to make sure it does, whatever way the vote goes -- not just here but in other parts of Britain too."

The problem with participatory democracy, Allan worried, is that "then I would have to participate." She was likely thinking about participatory democracy as off-hours voluntarism. This reflects many people's views, akin to Oscar Wilde's famous quip about socialism: "it takes too many evenings." A democracy of active volunteers, in addition to elected officials, seems only for the most public-spirited.

But there is another way to understand participatory democracy, one that I believe will be central to democracy in the 21st Century.

As Marie-Louise Strӧm, my wife, observed in our family trip through Scotland in August before the referendum, democratic energy was everywhere -- and such energy was associated with the idea that "we can build the society we want."

Such comments intimate an understanding of democracy built by the people. In such democracy, citizenship is much more than campaigning, voting or volunteering. Citizenship is expressed through everyday work with public significance and impact. And such citizenship is not only practiced by those able to vote. We were struck by the energy and interest of children and young people in the referendum, below the voting age of 16.

Work with public qualities, or public work, produces what Sara Evans and I have called free spaces in places such as classrooms and schools, colleges, local businesses and unions, religious congregations and many other sites. Free spaces are centers of civic life and empowerment, sustained by public workers, where people come together on an equal footing to develop relationships across differences, learn democratic habits and create sustained cultures of imagination and innovation.

Free spaces and public work educate a democratic people. And only a democratic people can form the foundation of a democratic society.

We saw many intimations of free spaces in the Scottish referendum. The campaign not only activated volunteers and voters. It also energized civic life in businesses, professions, schools and colleges -- even in Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, which we visited.

What would it mean for such civic energy to continue?

Fiona Ivanski, the woman who felt "terrible emptiness," also argued that "you have to take the positives" from the election. Her husband Vincent, who voted no, agreed. "This may be the beginning of something new," he told the New York Times. I believe that he is right -- Scotland was pioneering things to come.

The fledgling movement for "civic science," mentioned in my last blog, "Democracy and the People's Climate March," is another case that suggests possibilities for democracy at work.

As a group of us organizing a forthcoming workshop on civic science at the National Science Foundation describe in our White Paper, A Call to Civic Science, "In civic science, scientists express democratic citizenship through their scientific work: they engage in democratic world-building efforts as scientists."

This effort, like the Scottish referendum, may help in the great work of reawakening democracy.

This post is written for readers working in higher education reform and was originally published on the Completion by Design blog. Completion by Design is a national initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that works with community colleges to significantly increase completion and graduation rates. Read more about our work with Completion by Design.

“Competency-based education” (CBE) is one of the most ubiquitous buzz phrases in higher education today. But what it is and what it means for the student success and completion movement remains to be seen. Most simply, “competency-based” is used to describe any model or approach that substitutes the assessment of student learning for seat-time measures when determining a learner’s progress toward a degree or credential. There are a few facts and trends that, when taken together, help account for the incredible rise of interest in CBE in recent years:

• The basic “currency” of higher education, the credit hour, was invented to solve an administrative problem and was never intended to serve as a proxy for student learning. Yet here we are today with 60 credit hours and 120 credit hours generally defining the boundaries of an associates and bachelors degree respectively.
• The amount of student-loan debt has passed $1.2 trillion (with $1 trillion of that debt in the form of federal loans), but the amount of learning remains unclear.
• 34 million Americans (more that 20% of the working-age population) have some college credits but no degree.
• Colleges and universities supplement the credit hour with grades as a way to connect time and learning, yet a majority of employers are dissatisfied with the quality of recent graduates and research suggests that student learning outcomes are questionable.
• The tremendous difficulties students face as they try to transfer credits between institutions only demonstrates that colleges and universities themselves don’t believe that the credit hours can be used as a proxy for student learning. If institutions had confidence that earning credits equal learning, then seamless transfer would be the norm.

Competency-based models aren’t exactly new – some have been around for decades, with first-generation innovators like Excelsior College in existence for more than 40 years. And a new generation of innovators at public institutions, those like Kentucky Community College and Technical System and University of Wisconsin-Extension, have built and launched a new generation of models that they hope will scale to a wide range of learners not well served by traditional models.

But there are real and serious questions to be asked about the conditions under which competency-based models are appropriate and for what types of learners. There are also fundamental questions about what constitutes high-quality when it comes to CBE programs.

There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from colleges that have engaged in wholesale reform of curriculum on behalf of clearer pathways for students. And so I wasn’t at all surprised when Michael Horn at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) in North Carolina contacted me after hearing that Public Agenda is providing facilitation and project management support to the Competency-Based Education Network. Horn reached out because CPCC has found that its pathway redesign work has led naturally to a competency mindset.

A focus on creating accelerated pathways for students has occurred at warp speed in North Carolina. According to Horn, faculty-led reform -- backed by policy changes at the local and state level -- have resulted in dramatic changes in the curriculum and its delivery.

Over the past four years, CPCC has been involved in a host of interrelated efforts to create coherent pathways for students. These include reforming developmental education so that it is an on-ramp instead of an invidious sorting mechanism, engaging in ground-up curriculum redesign of high demand programs in IT and Advanced Manufacturing, and focusing on pathways for transfer between 2-year and 4-year institutions. Such efforts have led to the implementation of a new intrusive advising protocol that brings together faculty and counselors to co-create with students clear “maps” to degrees and careers.

Horn marvels at how easily “the modularization and digitization of these redesigned pathways have also led to profound changes in pedagogy. Math and technical program faculty have intuitively flipped classrooms and labs, freeing them to engage students in new and creative ways -- online and elbow to elbow.” The picture below summarizes how the various pieces fit together, and shows a coherent vision with intensive activity at multiple levels.

All of CPCC’s initiatives have had one thing in common: the passionate dedication of faculty leadership across the state, backed by leaders hell bent on changing the way students are served. When Horn tells the story of North Carolina’s journey, he focuses on what was most surprising, and this is where our story circles back to the significance of CBE. The speed with which faculty were able, once given the opportunity and support to deliberate together, to establish consensus on competencies and learning outcomes across courses and across educational systems has been eye-opening and heartening. The story he tells underscores the importance of broad-based co-ownership of reform efforts that go beyond thin notions of faculty “buy-in,” and points us toward what is perhaps most promising about competency-based approaches.

While many consider CBE a “new model” and an alternative to traditional modalities, and one that offers a potentially cheaper/faster route to credentials, its greatest promise may in fact reside it its ability to push traditional higher education to think more deeply and creatively than ever before about what rigorous and high-quality learning outcomes work ought to look like.

Today, there are several colleges already coupling competency-informed curriculum redesign with other tools and strategies designed to support their student success and completion goals. For these colleges and the faculty who have done the heavy lift of articulating learning outcomes in ways that help students progress based on what they know and are able to do, the connections between pathway redesign work and CBE are manifold and meaningful.

As the current generation of innovators in competency-based education learn and mature, the lessons learned in North Carolina about the need for broad-based co-ownership of the student-success efforts will become all the more important.

While it is unclear whether CBE will go the way of the MOOCs or grow to become a strong alternative to traditional models, there are undeniable and potentially powerful connections between the work of creating clear pathways for students and the work of ensuring that student progression toward degree is determined by knowledge demonstrated instead of time served. These are exciting times indeed, and those like CPCC who are engaged in the wholesale rethink of their work should be front and center.