If you were in the workshop and want something fixed – let me know.

April 19, 2009
Paul Clark OU, UK
Weave academic and professional competencies
Distance ed makes this particularly acute – and need intervention
Tim Omeara – Ninth House – Leadership
Competence – Leadership dev – soft skills – simple scope
What do people know – what do they need to know – and how to get the info to those folks.
Interest in portable competency definition – PDI as an example.
— What about the need to flex – folksonomy – or top down taxonomy
Shiela MacNeill – JISC CETIS
Design for Learning – design content learning situations.
Interest in TenCompetence
David O’Conner – Pearson
HE focus – moving into K12
Outcomces and assessing
What are we trying to learn?
Chris Kaefer – McGraw Hill – K12 – professions
Content Models
Focus increasingly work with learning objectives – tagging level align learning objectives – take it outside of text book covers – must insure that design meets needs of adopting customers. Many different meanings and definitions.
Michael Erdely – Thomson Learning
Engineer – technical
Find a way for learners to own their core competencies
Portable competencies – secure interoperability
Maggie Beers – BC IT -> SFSU
Link between a LT Center – best practices – moving into a more technical application for that. Used to being on ent architecs.
PDI – consulting firm – intervention 3 x 6 competency model for soft skills
Learning objective – comes close to content – tracking point and patch cord connects content – (Satisfied, score) – to some other point in my system.
Competency is contextualized to “my world”
The two are connected but the connection between them is no universal – there is no “one mapping”.
There are lots of levels. Hierarchy is present in both LO and competency definitions.
k12 does this in each state.
Should we standardize learning objectives? Nah – just give a GUID? Connect them in.
Lacking: No place to indicate if something helps with a concept or measures a concept – this ends up in
Build global competencies? Portable for what purpose?
Global LO’s are important for things like CSU Digital market place.
Language for describing and exchange competencies
Where do the learners fit in? Who knows the mapping? Does the teacher or student or the content maker know about this?
Important to bring learner into this – so folks can find themselves in the netowkr of learning objectives and competencies.
Basic Reading skills. Have some trusted bodies. Testing body might certify this that can measure that core competency for you.
Problem with national qualification – passing exam is not “does not need remediating”.
Who cares?
New Media in BC – not enough graduates – eCompetencies tool – self identifiy – action plan – expected competencies. – marketing plan – data mining. Book volunteer industries that wanted the skills – BC ministry helped seed the thing. Helpful for students.
Lots of customers care about this? Saves them money to figure this out. Helps keep down wasted time investment – they care when they hire.
Make a map – state by state.
In Europe – Working group – IEEE + SCORM folks – lots of europeans – competency data interchange format schema/manifest. Couple of drafts 0 looks like SCORM 1.3 manifest – roll up – same sort of roll up as simple sequencing. These
Transport Canada have competiecies – are there federal examples?
Will folks open source the stuff? Not interested in keeping things close to chest.
Making a schema is easy – but true portability – because no one will bow to other opinions of competency model.
Describe problem – Scope and Use cases
What is the barrier?
Lack of agreement of competency terminology – taxonomy. But quickly
Must stop at a certain level of generality that we must stop at? Accept that the detail is local not global.
At what point do these things become useful?
Top down or folksonomy?
Do both at once – recognizable interface – to they converge to one point?
In a way – we can do this! In LOM there *is* a taxon-path into *some* catalog – a set of definitions map descriptions. Publish and define the map. Everyone publishes their taxon paths reference – publish the reference – go to catalog – has keywords, etc. Could have maps of things UK HE to Pearson.
Can build system that will self assemble.
Agreement on common terminology. What does “critical thinking mean”? 300 learning objectives in a book.
What about a standard of a taxon-path catalog and a services API and web service for a catalog service. Folks could publish their catalog.
If two organizations publish catalogs – then they can
if everyone had a catalog that is published – pointers to maps.
Taxon catalog – LOM educational purpose – why not require this?
What about contrib?
Make TAXon paths – real uris
Catalogs are something that can be searched with text or keywords and give you some potential Taxon paths that might be appropriate for the content you are working on.
Competency model definiton schema. Import and export comp
Question – should IMS be in the taxonomy registration business? no.
Should IMS be in the business of protocols and APIs to navigate taxonomies? OK.
Format of taxonoly description exchange? Certainly yes but – don’t reinvent the wheel?
Portfolios is the venue to demonstrate these competencies. Portfolio is something you take with you.
Look at IMS ePort and make sure there is a place to capture taxonomy marking – imitating the IEEE LOM pattern for tag marking with Taxonomies.
Collection of artifacts that demonstrate some competency.
Note general need to improve ePortfolio standards in general – not our particular scope but something we are nervous about.
Where do they get stored? Who owns them? Where is the border between that which the organization and individual
. What is authoritative? In the corporate environment – it is even larger.
Use cases
Cal State Digital Market Place / Content Federation
Help lead faculty to appropriate content from many sources (free and commercial) and help them mix in content from many publishers in some uniform model based on globally known competency identifiers.
Faculty Development / Lesson Planning
Lesson plans – never saw a proper learning outcome – enter a topic – prompts for competencies – select competencies – learning outcomes present – make a lesson plan – learning activities – learning tools. Suggests resources – ranking – Amazonning – select some assessment – automatically makes space – find other portfolios that demonstrate achievement – practice achieving these things – export their own competency into a portfolio which joins the other sources of evidence.
Pedagogy planners – wiki based approach – pedagogy wizard – suggests tools, (1) Phoebe – Oxford (2) London Metropolitan Pedagogy Planner.
Open Learn
Inform counseling session – from perhaps a publisher that has info about a student from prior activity.
Learn Direct – Map courses – what we could do is advise them to go to learn direct – learn direct helps optimize student’s learning path.
Have a free-text description of the learning outcome – not there is no assessment as to whether the outcome was accomplished.
Publishers
Something spans the secondary school / college space – re-mediation – placement test. Placement service that can measure competencies.
Standard that could be imported into counselor’s system. Note – often publishers are stymied by privacy issues. But counselors and teachers *need* the this information! Have a conversation with instructors where the common vocabulary is what competencies and learning objectives are what is needed.
LMS like Sakai/BB
Adding competency tagging to portfolio systems to enhance the richness and usefullness of portfolios as they move from system to system.
Corporate like Ford/Pharma
As training coordinator – I need ot import content and have it align itself and register with my competency model. I just got a mail from the CEO and it is time to get good at “fiber optic” – I need to find content and vendors and select – including soe sense of how effective this will work in my context and competencies.