Nowadays, the management and interoperability of data about learning outcomes (knowledge, skill and competence) are of high importance for both education and employment sectors. By managing and sharing data about their profiles, learners in higher education and life long learning can better plan their careers and enhance their employability potential. In order to achieve this goal, the information about learning outcomes associated to units of learning as well as the learning outcomes achieved by learners need to be captured, stored and exchanged in a common format. This is the background for the latest ICOPER Suitability Reports for Better Practice, titled "Model for describing learning needs and learning opportunities taking context ontology modelling into account".
Currently, in the context of online learning, higher education institutions have yet adopted neither a common format for describing learning outcome definitions, nor formats for describing learning outcome profiles of learners.
Using a common format for describing, referencing and sharing learning outcome definitions allow the exchange and comparison of learning outcome definitions across systems, domains and sectors. For instance, data about learning outcomes achieved in one course or by one student and stored at auniversity database may be exchanged with an HR system of an employment agency. In other words, the two systems can refer to a common definition of a learning outcome with a common meaning. By this way, a lifelong learner would be able to access his/her achieved learning outcomes from the school, the university, the training agencies and the employer in one profile. This work would enable the matching between what people learn in universities (and schools) and what they need to know and be able to do at work. The gap in learner skills and knowledge may be easily identified.
The main focus of Learning Needs and Opportunities Testbed Work Package (WP2) of the ICOPER project is to:
- Develop a common format that can be used by universities to describe learning outcome definitions. This will enable the implementation of a central repository of learning outcomes that is accessible by teachers and instructional designers in different learning environments. Those learning outcomes can then be linked to units of learning across university(ies) courses and programmes.
- Develop common format for describing learning outcome profiles of learners. This profile should capture information on learning outcomes achieved by learners, such as the relations between learning outcomes, proficiency level oflearning outcomes and the associated evidence to those outcomes. Additional information includes the context where the learning outcomeis achieved or applied (e.g., subject domain or location). The data presented in a learning profile can be imported to different learning, training and recruitment systems. Importing such profiles also into social applications like LinkedIn and Facebook offers high portabilityof such valuable learner information.
This report introduces two ICOPER specifications that have been developed to capture data about learning outcomes and profiles of learner learning outcome profiles. Section 2 presents the ICOPER Learning Outcome Definitions (LOD) datamodel. In Section 3, the ICOPER Learner Outcome Profile (LOP) is introduced. Section 4 provides some conclusions and future directions.