1st Symposium on Competencies
On 3rd December 2008, the European Experts Symposium took place in Berlin with the title “Competencies as the Common Currency 4 Learning Outcomes – Towards Needs Requirements for Competency Based Learning”. The symposium was organized by the ICOPER Best Practice Network, the EA-TEL SIGs Professional TEL and Foresight Studies, the EducaNext Foundation and representatives from standards organizations and European projects in the area. Thirty distinguished experts from higher education, industry and standardization bodies were engaged in a Learning Cafe format, discussing the definition and modelling of competencies in different sectors. All projects that had been working in the competency domain were taking part in the symposium that concluded with the plan to establish a European Competency SIG.
The two main themes of the Berlin Symposium were:
- Competencies in Higher Education: Needs Requirements for Universities?
How to link qualification frameworks to competency development in terms of outcome-based descriptions of learning offerings and course outlines (concept definitions, requirements, scenarios and indicators). - Towards Common Semantics for Competencies & Portfolios (Personal Profiles): Linking the educational offerings of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to life after university.
Use of learning to increase employability in terms of acquiring competencies that can increase professional choices over the individual’s lifetime (lessons from the corporate sector, requirements, scenarios and indicators).
The unique composition of this symposium, together with its pioneering methodology of synergy and interaction, provided and documented new ideas and concerns. These were crystallized in a series of observations (table reports), important for future planning in this field as well as for a common European understanding and practice regarding competencies.
Summarized results from symposium in Berlin
Amongst others, the dialogue resulted in the articulation of the following interesting points:
- Different communities of practice have different definitions for competencies.
- According to the European Qualification Framework (EQF) competency means the proven ability to use knowledge, skills, and personal, social and/or methodological abilities in work or study situations as well as in professional and personal development. Therefore, the concepts skills, knowledge and abilities are subcomponents of competency.
- Competencies are generic (like in the Universal Competency Framework from SHL. Those generic competencies can be contextualized for specific domains, subjects or situations.
Examples:- Generic competency: Applying knowledge and understanding.
- Contextualized (subjective) competency: Applying concepts taken from anthropology, economics, geography and technology to an interdisciplinary study of international development.
- One of the few European projects that dealt with learning outcome-based curricula development is the HE-LeO. This project offers some guidelines and recommendations on implementing competency based curricula. Nevertheless, these are not put in practice in online courses yet.
- Teachers should define courses based on learning outcomes. Institutions should design learning experience around outcomes.
- Competency frameworks should relate curricula, competencies, learning outcomes and the objectives of the stakeholders.
- Semantic web technologies are suitable for describing competency frameworks through the use of common identifiers. Matching is different to selection: Matching can be done automatically, selection is human controlled.
- In a learning outcome based education assessment should be relevant to learning outcomes. Different competencies may use different assessment methods.
- Portfolios and competencies are moving towards each other. Competencies in a portfolio are MY definition of competencies, PLUS those definitions of OTHERS of the SAME competency.
- Collaboration and consistency is the key to ensure portability of competencies across domains and sectors. Liaison groups for competencies are an enabler for common semantics and production of portable competency profiles.
- Collaborations between standardization bodies like IMS Global Learning Consortium, IEEE LTSC, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC36, HR-XML <link http://www.hr-xml.org/hr-xml/wms/hr-xml-1-org/index.php?id={54229ABFCFA5649E7003B83DD4755294|91|2}> and CEN (WS-LT, eSkills and TC 353) is very important.
More information on this event can be found here.
