eBlog by Tore Hoel

The ICOPER Berlin symposium with the sweeping title “C O M P E T E N C I E S as the Common Currency 4 Learning Outcomes – Towards a needs requirements for competency based learning” last week came up with a lot of discussion; a number of position papers and background notes; an overview of the many EU projects working with Competency issues; and a very first draft for a proposes reference model for Competency Data Management.

If you are interested in the European work on competency frameworks and standardisation issues concerning competencies I would recommend you go to to the Symposium wiki to find links to the recordings, papers and presentations. Also, I would recommend to have a look at the video clips from the discussions at icoper.blip.tv.

The symposium results will be reported to CEN/ISSS WS-LT at the next meeting in Athens 9 January, and I will therefore point to the draft of the proposed reference model as a document that needs to be discussed, both in the ICOPER project and within the standards community.

The document is based on some earlier work by Luk Vervenne, chair of HR-XML, late Claude Ostyne of IEEE LTSC WG20 and now Jehad Najjar, who works in the ICOPER project. It is an early draft, and it is not clear if this could be presented as the consensus of the Berlin symposium or the ICOPER project. Anyway, it is a good starting point for the broad discussions that is needed to harmonise the views of the entreprise world and the HE community on competency issues.

The scope of the reference model is to meet “specific business requirements identified in application areas such as education, personal development and learning content development as well as hiring, performance improvement and training”. In other words, this initiative tries to use the technologies developed in the training and enterprise sector (which already has an established market for competency technologies and services) to embrace higher education and life long learning, encouraged by the EU policies to implement a European Qualification Framework though National Qualification Frameworks. The proposal points to the HR-XML and IMS joint effort to create “Common Semantics for Employability” as the vehicle to achieve this, and indirectly asks other standards fora to lay off, waiting for the process to be finalized in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36.

In my opinion the draft calls for a broad discussion across the different European projects represented in the Berlin Symposium, and within European standards groups. The reason for this is that I am not at all convinced that we have a consensus on the proposed reference model.

The Concepts
The draft comes up with a number terms and definitions. And it seems that some definitions are lacking, others are presupposing an abstract model that is not outlined in the draft. Competency is said to have three subcomponents, knowledge, skills and abilities. The last concept is not defined in the draft. Knowledge is in fact defined as information processing (”assimilation of information through learning”), which is highly contested. The definition of learning outcomes introduces a concept of attitudes, not defined in the model. The concept of Competency Framework is equivalent to a repository, which differs from the way the term Framework is used in many standards. Furthermore, the model uses the terms competency and competence (the latter being competency in a particular context). The discussions so far in international fora shows that this distinction is very hard to explain to non English communities, and it make translations to other languages very difficult.

It seems that the authors behind the draft have got tired of trying to define their concepts, as they end the section on definitions with the the following: “Nevertheless, in this reference model it is possible to collect and manipulate data relating to competency, regardless of what competency means.” You may fish with this approach, but if you catch a shark and not only fish, you should be OK. Well, maybe?!

A model for management
The draft outlines a model for Competency Data Management. I would ask if this is not a too narrow perspective for a model addressing the needs of a European Competency Framework. Especially, if this is harnessed in a repository only, ref. the definition of a Competency Framework in the draft. Added the large data model and XML “bias” of the draft, I wonder if the approach taken is more adapted to the needs of the 80’s and 90’s than the future knowledge society. I have the feeling that the sheer complexity of the proposed reference model is going to be a major barrier to implementation.

Cultural issues
The last issue I will raise addresses the model’s ability to engage higher education, the prime target group of the ICOPER project. In fact, a reference model should be a “template” for discussion with the communities interested in implementing the standards and specifications that are referenced. My concern is that the scenarios for building for example competency profiles should use Higher Ed use cases, capturing the full range of HE activities, not only training for “high risk professions” (pilots, drivers, medical doctors, etc.) The case of baking bread (often used in discussing these issues) might be illustrative for training, but how relevant is it for what happens in higher education?

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