Join the Competency SIG mail list

Please join the mail list at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/skill-competence

This is an extract of the introductory mail from Simon Grant and Rowin Young of CETIS when opening the list:

Dear Colleague,
As a participant in the recent CETIS event on Competences for learning, assessment and portfolio, you are invited to participate in a new list – http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/skill-competence -- intended to enable and encourage discussion and agreement around issues in this domain. What is there in existing specifications that is valuable towards these ends? What would be a good scope for one or more specifications? What is required to be represented, to get a simple but durable specification that is fit for purpose? What would work well for developers, to ensure a good uptake? Could there be a solution so straightforward that it can be agreed and implemented quickly? Skill or competence -- however you define them and related terms -- is a common thread linking learning (outcomes), assessment and evaluation (criteria), job and higher course requirements (skills, competence), and personal abilities. People may aim to acquire them; their skills and competences may be aided by learning, education or training; they may be required by higher courses and jobs; they may be important features in discussions of educational progression and career pathways, from the earliest learning to professional status and appointment to top posts.

Many learning technology tools are related to skills and competences. E-portfolio tools may document people's aspirations towards them and plans to attain them. Curriculum management tools may use them as structure. E-learning systems may use them in several ways. Assessment tools may play a part in assessing their attainment by people. IAG tools may refer to them. Tools that support creation of presentations, CVs or application forms may use evidence related to them. Recruitment services might define person specifications in terms of them. The breadth of possible use can be bewildering, and cause people to lose sight of the fact that they are talking about things that share an essential similarity: they are all about what people may be able to do, and the roles they may be able to fill successfully; about the characteristics of people that are relevant in many selections for many purposes.

It is possible to build information systems and tools around a specific set of skills or competences, for a specific purpose. But, usually, a tool that can be used with one set may be usable for many other related sets. These sets often have structure, so they can perhaps better be called frameworks. This ability to reuse frameworks in many different tools is likely to hugely expand the possibilities of both the tools and the frameworks, saving vast amounts of effort compared with a bespoke approach.

However, in order to do that, we need an effective specification that allows frameworks of skill/competence to be represented, and then used by all these tools. There does not seem to be any widely recognised standard that does what is needed, at present. Individual skills or competences can be represented by URI, by a web page, by an IMS RDCEO or IEEE RCD structure, or in many other ways, but what is needed is a way of representing a set of these, along with the relationships inherent between them, and between the definitions in one framework and related ones in other frameworks.

Certainly, there is a demand from e-portfolio tool developers for this kind of specification. How does this relate to actual or latent demand from developers of other kinds of tools and services? Doing that job thoroughly may involve revisiting the question of the representing the generic structure or attributes of skills or competences. If this proves to be a live issue, this forum will be able to take up these related questions as well. The interest is by no means confined to the UK. The CEN/ISSS Workshop on learning technologies has recently formed an interest group in the area. With them, we plan to agree on the use of a wiki space for collaboration on ideas and building documentation. European projects are underway that focus around related issues. The medical and health professional communities both in the UK and in North America have a keen interest in this area, from the points of view both of education and of professional certification etc. And there are probably many other interested people, groups, initiatives, and projects that we have overlooked. If you are interested, please join us by signing up at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/skill-competence