Abstract—To meet the challenges of the future society, many international organizations have introduced their frameworks of key competencies. It has become an international consensus that people should develop key competencies to deal with the challenges brought by globalization and technological change. Helping college students develop key competencies will enable them to better adapt to the future life. Aiming at developing key competencies of students at tertiary level, we built a cooperative learning model based on Johnson and Johnson’s five key elements of cooperative learning and established a cooperative learning group following the model. After three months of cooperative learning, all participants reported significant improvements in their key competencies, encompassing knowledge, skills, and attitudes/values, which shows that cooperative learning can be effective in enhancing key competencies of students at tertiary level. The study also discusses the strategies that should be adopted to facilitate effective learning and the challenges that may appear in the cooperative learning process.