What is Competency-Based

This chapter provides an example of a secondary-education curriculum tailored to increase 21st century students´ motivation in second-language study by integrating digital learning into the classroom. The proposed syllabus is competency-based, open-structured, and promotes active learning within the constructivist paradigm. The research focus of this chapter suggests raising discussion on the practical benefits this type of curriculum design has on learning. The accompanying challenges that institutions face will also be addressed. The legal framework was based on public-school policy, the autonomous regulations in the Valencian Community, Spanish National Legislation, and the International Guidelines of the Council of Europe. The syllabus content is supported by such programs as Quizlet and Anki App for vocabulary acquisition; Kahoot, Socrative, and Jeopardy App for reading comprehension and grammar work; and Augment and HP Reveal for visuospatial stimulus via augmented reality. Web-based platforms such as Adobe Spark, Explain Everything, Nearpod, Padlet, and Canva, among others, were applied for digital story-making, videocast, interactive presentations, discussion boards, graphic-novel writing activities, etc. It should be noted that this design is just one of various options, that the current educational system in Spain is expecting curricular changes and that digital technology and internet-based resources need to be constantly checked for updates.