Competency-Based Curriculum Design for Online Graduate Education: A Scoping Review with Implications for Emerging African Universities

Abstract

Background: The expansion of online and hybrid graduate education has shifted the central quality question from delivery feasibility to whether institutions can credibly demonstrate advanced, assessable graduate capability in digitally mediated environments. Competency-based education offers a promising framework for this challenge, but its conceptual foundations and implementation logics remain uneven across higher education. Objective: This scoping review aimed to map how competency-based curriculum design is conceptualised and operationalised in online graduate education and to identify curriculum, assessment, platform, faculty-development, and governance implications for emerging African universities. Methods: Guided by Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review methodology and a Population-Concept-Context framework, the review mapped peer-reviewed studies together with selected policy and quality assurance documents retrieved through structured searching and targeted source identification relevant to online graduate education, competency-based design, and digital higher education governance. Results: The evidence converged around six interdependent domains: competency specification, curriculum architecture, assessment evidence chains, online interaction design, learning management system configuration, and faculty and governance capability. The review found that the central problem is not merely definitional ambiguity, but the failure to sustain alignment from competency statements to valid assessment, platform workflows, and institutional quality assurance. It also found that much of the available evidence comes from higher-capacity systems and professionally regulated disciplines, limiting direct transferability to emerging African universities. Conclusion: Competency-based online graduate curricula are most defensible when treated as institution-wide design architectures rather than course-level innovations. For emerging African universities, credible implementation depends on coherent alignment among curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, platform design, faculty development, and quality management. The review therefore argues for selective translation rather than uncritical borrowing of dominant models.