WP2: Skill and Competence Based Integration and Services

The main objective of WP2 is to implement and provide metadata services to enrich and search for open content based on skills, competences, and competence profiles and competence levels.

Nearly all HR processes are competence and skill driven. Nevertheless latest approaches in competence management are rarely applied successfully in education. For this reasons the working group is analyzing competence based educational scenarios and competence services for the stakeholders of the OpenScout project. As competence services we see all services that can support the competence development of individuals. A first review of competence based management education  and exploration of existing services has been conducted in the first year resulting into the deliverable “D2.1 Analysis report on competence services”.

The approach to support competence-based education with the OpenScout environment involves several top-down and bottom-up activities. As a first step an initial competence taxonomy has been developed with academic partners in the project to enable learners to identify learning resources in the OpenScout environment. As complementary approach a problem collection has been developed especially for SME users of the environment (see Kalz et al., 2010). These top-down approaches should be combined in the future with bottom up facilities for learners to enrich the metadata of learning resources with purpose and context information.

While the current work focuses on competence information for learning resources individual competence profiles will be another direction that will be explored. For the resources and the individual competence profiles standards to describe them play a critical role. For this purpose members from WP2 will participate in discussion of international and European standardization bodies.