Thank you everyone for taking an interest in this topic. IMHO, this topic is at the core of teaching and learning. Allow me to illustrate...
Suppose you are teaching a course on how to do some basic cooking for a short order cook. The people you are training may or may not have great "academic" skills, but they can follow instructions if explained to them.
So, when you put together your course, you define all the tasks that a short order cook does. Here are a few, in no particular order:
1. Reads the customer order
2. Heats up a grill
3. Seasons a pan
4. Cooks an egg
5. Cooks pancakes
The list could go on, but if you want a good cook, each of these tasks should be done to perfection. Customers don't want their eggs runny when they order them scrambled. Pancakes cannot be wet and soggy. You get the picture...
Now, within each of the tasks above, there are subskills needed to do them correctly. For example, to cook an egg, the cook needs to know all the kinds of possible egg cooking varieties there are. Souffle, over-easy, over-medium, scrambled, poached, etc.
But, in order to cook an egg, it is absolutely vital that the cook understand English and can read an order. He or she also needs to know how to properly season the cookware. So what comes first, the order or the egg?
My point is that CBE isn't just a series of competencies, nor is it just getting a "passing" grade on any predefined competency. In this example, customers want their eggs made exactly right each time and every time. Therefore, if we are teaching a cooking course, the graduates from our school must not pass the course with some kind of sliding scale of how well each competency was learned (A,B,C,D,F), but instead we want them to master as many of the essentials as possible. I understand that our school wants letter grades attached to courses, however, ther real meaning behind the letter grades is not going to be how well each competency is learned, but instead on how MANY competencies are learned. Potential employers need to know which skills our graduates have mastered. In fact, using this logic, I would propose that a graduate of our school would have proof of each competency mastered in the form of a transcript that lists which competencies were mastered. In that way, a potential employer would be able to "cherry pick" which skills are essential for the job they are hiring and which ones are not. If they want to hire a cook, but it is not essential that the cook knows how to wash dishes (even though we might have taught dish washing), then it would not be important that their pool of potential employees mastered the skill of dish washing, but it WOULD be important that they mastered egg cooking! So, when they review transcripts of potential employees, only graduates with those skillsets that are important to their business would be considered for the jobs.
In our traditional models of teaching, when an institution certifies its graduates, it is saying, in essence, that ALL its graduates are equal, because ALL of them met "minimum standards" I am advocating not for MINIMUMS, but for MASTERIES! Ask yourself this...if you had a critical illness, which doctor would you want, the one who got a C average in medical school, or the one who graduated summa cum laude? After all, they are both "doctors", right? The answer is obvious.
Now, how would you apply this idea to academic subjects and testing? There are certainly some subjects that are more theory and knowledge-based than performance-based. Math students come to mind. Mathematics are a hard science. You either know it or you don't. Nevertheless, if you don't know geometry, you won't be able to do trigonometry. Additionally, if you miss a particular piece of geometry (the Pythagorean Theorem for example), you won't be able to calculate the angles of a triangle, and if you can't do that, then you can't properly understand how to calculate the acceleration of a ball down an incline in trigonometry. And, suppose that the day they taught the Pythagorean Theorem you were absent? You might still get a B in the math course, but you completely missed an ESSENTIAL concept that would handicap you in future math studies.
By defining essentials in an academic course (as opposed to ancillary competencies that aren't essential, but still important) and requiring mastery of those essentials, the confidence level of the school in its graduates is going to be much higher than simply judging graduates on the letter grade they achieved in their school career.
So, if CBE is implemented properly in Moodle, there needs to be acknowledgement of the need for mastery in each competency. Its OK if you want to judge your students as Superior, Passing, Marginal, or any other criteria, but just remember that the demands of the workplace are more concerned nowadays with whether your graduates are competent at serving their customers with the skills they define. If CBE is to succeed, it needs to have a method of ACCURATELY reporting on the skill levels of its students. The existing paradigm of letter grades for an entire course, not taking into account the mastery of the subsets required to succeed in a skill, are, IMHO, outmoded and inadequate for the economies of the 21st century.