Curriculum teams are increasingly aware of the need to document the skills and competences that students should acquire during their course, for example to meet the demands of the Skills for growth white paper (England).  CETIS is actively engaged in the development of, and consensus building around the use of competency standards within the education sector: see the CETIS Topic page on Competences.

Most programme specification documents require consideration of target skills and competences, though the LLiDA study found almost no consistency across institutions in terms of the guidance given to course teams. There is concern from the baseline reports that programme documentation may not fit well with stated institutional aims in terms of graduate competences. It is possible for definitive course documents to remain vague, and it can be difficult to map competences from academic language to the terms used by employers, including considerations of level and depth.

Several projects are therefore interested to define competences more clearly, to support interoperability of curriculum elements, and to help learners match their learning needs to available programmes of study. For example, Cluster A projects in the Design programme are finding that:

• dialogue with employers and professional bodies to agree a workable definition of competences allows for curricula to be kept flexible and up to date
  
• validating desired competences rather than content helps to produce more a open and flexible curriculum, and is essential in a negotiated curriculum (whether negotiated with individual students, a cohort, or an employer)
  
• defining competences is necessary both for APEL (accreditation of prior learning) and to support recording and showcasing of outcomes after completing a programme of study
  

 Activities being undertaken by projects in this cluster include:

• Mapping current curriculum against high-level skills/competence frameworks
• Working with employers to develop negotiated curricula around competence definitions
  
• Developing advice and guidance for students to support development/showcasing of high-level competences
• Developing information, advice and guidance for students to support elective choice within curriculum

In the Delivery programme, several projects focused on issues around 21st century graduate attributes and competencies, including ISCC, Making the new Diploma a success, Atelier-D, Springboard TV, COWL, eBiolabs.
Others focused on enhancing literacies that would improve students' lifelong learning opportunities (Making the new Diploma a success:

see also Digital Literacy

Dynamic Learning Maps intends to use the XML specification - MedBiquitous Competency Framework.

Quotes:

• Employers don't always know or articulate clearly what they want in terms of competences and in any case tend to give more weight to the class of degree and awarding institution, rather than the specific content.

• As students ... will all take different learning pathways towards their award, we thought it would be a good idea to record and store them in the repository for following cohorts. This enables subsequent students to see what course others used to fill their competency gaps. … [Technically] A simple (parsimonious) solution is to just map competency gaps to course/modules taken.

Standards and technologies:

• MLO
• XCRI 

See also digital literacy (for a learning and teaching focus) and graduate capabilities (for a more employment focus)

Resources from the design studio

View all resources in the Design Studio tagged 'competences'