Competence structures and portfolio tools 2010

This meeting arose from what is now a very definite interest in competence-related use of portfolio tools, in various areas, most obviously in medical education and training.

Compared with our meeting in July 2009, this meeting was more focused on what is needed to move forward towards a specification.

People
Particularly welcome were users and developers of competence-oriented portfolio (or related) tools. Of course, the meeting was open to all with an interest in the area.

Agenda
The topic of the day relates to several policy initiatives to do with skills, education, training, and work/employment. However, we did not discuss policy and politics, but rather discussed what we can do technically in terms of developing portfolio and related tools to handle competence structures more effectively. There are many such tools that are related to such structures – sometimes called "skills", "competencies", "competences", "abilities" or other names. The tools often allow learners to assemble evidence of their own abilities against a given framework, which may be a curricular framework, an assessment framework, or a personal or professional development framework. We want to allow any tool to use any suitable framework, and that will require an agreed way of representing the frameworks.

The frameworks themselves are envisaged as placed on a web server so that they can be retrieved on the web.

We also informed attendees of a small JISC initiative to coordinate the initial development of an appropriate interoperability specification for the representation of frameworks of skill/etc., for which an ITT is expected in November.

Morning
After an introductory outline of the issues involved, we had 5 demonstrations of the kinds of tool for which the interoperability is desired. These tools allow learners to gather and organise evidence against a skills or competency framework or profile, whether or not this evidence is used in formal assessment. Tools covered a spectrum from schools to professional and work contexts.


 * Shane Sutherland of Pebble Learning presented the relevant features of PebblePad.
 * Dave Waller of MyKnowledgeMap presented the relevant features of Multi-Port and other MKM tools.
 * Karim Derrick and Matt Wingfield of TAG Developments presented the relevant features of MAPS.
 * James Ballard of ULCC presented features of a competency tracking tool for Moodle, with potential application also to Mahara.
 * Rich Goodman of Loughborough University presented the RAPID tool, which has lacked development funding recently.

Afternoon
We had a plenary discussion about what is needed and what is practical
 * to enable structures (local frameworks) of skill or competence to be represented inside or outside portfolio tools according to a common model;
 * in such a way that they can, in principle, be imported by a portfolio tool to customise it for a particular set of skills and competences;
 * and possibly, how professional frameworks can be articulated within the same structures.

Outcomes
See Simon's slides.

The attendees agreed with the general premises and logic set out in this presentation, and discussed the possible information structure features, as collected in the later slides added during the meeting. There was general agreement that:
 * a specification should be kept minimal, covering only a common core
 * we should consider the needs of other communities, so that the spec was more likely to be adopted by them
 * our authority rests with implementation within the portfolio tools community
 * many of the features listed belong to either
 * assessment, and they should not be included in the core spec
 * portfolio use, and they should be included in Leap2A, not the core competence spec

Resources and links

 * MedBiquitous Competencies working group
 * The CIPD's page on the "Leitch" agenda
 * The emerging ECVET initiative in Europe
 * The UK's QCF initiative