Competencies development and enhancement in ELTEC

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Distance learning programs partly address these needs. However, they are mostly designed as pre-defined sequences of training modules, not able to adapt to individual knowledge, skills or professional experience of a learner. Whereas beginners may benefit from such programs, those that have specific needs due to change of professional duties or appearance of new products or services they need to master, require a new type of environment for professional growth support. This paper describes an approach to learning content development based on the professional competency model. Four-facets competency model One reason for the increasing importance of competency concept in learning and training is rapid technological development in society. An additional reason is that today’s organizations are doing more knowledge and service work [6]. We consider competency as a core concept that determines training needs. The following basic definition is used. Competency - a specific, identifiable, definable, and measurable knowledge, skill, ability and/or other deployment-related characteristic (e.g. attitude, behavior, physical ability) which a human resource may possess and which is necessary for, or material to, the performance of an activity within a specific business context [2]. We suggest the following four-facet competency model for efficient control of competency growth: 1. Structure facet. This facet defines competency structure, its relations to other competencies and thus location within the competency map. We identify elementary (further non-divisible) competencies and complex competencies which may be described via other (more simple) competencies. 2. Mastery facet. This facet reflects a set of possible mastery levels for a certain set of competencies, such as beginner, advanced, professional etc. Thus it is possible to model quantitative and qualitative growth of proficiency in some field in case that competency models for beginner and expert are different. 3. KAS facet. Competency may belong to various domains (categories) cognitive, affective, and psychomotor [1]. Cognitive competency is related to the mental skills (Knowledge), affective describes growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude), while psychomotor is for manual or physical skills (Skills). According to KAS (Knowledge, Attitude, Skills) model, after competency training (learning) the learner possesses new skills, knowledge, or attitudes. Page 2 of 8
Cognitive domain involves knowledge and development of intellectual skills. This includes the recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills. There are six major categories – Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Affective domain includes the manner in which we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes. The psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination, and use of the motor-skill areas: Perception, Readiness to act, Guided response, Mechanism, Complex Overt Response, Adaptation. 4. Last facet reflects competency life cycle. In quickly developing fields, such as information technology (IT), approaches, technologies and products are continuously updated, which means that competency obtained several years ago may be no longer relevant. To reflect aging of obtained knowledge and skills, we suggest a measure of competency half-decay, i.e. time period within which professional competency of the educational body graduate is diminished in half because of the changes in the field. For IT specialists, this period is identified as 4-5 years. Competency life cycle variable reflects aging of the competency, its relevance to current state of the art and further life potential, which facilitates rating of competencies from the same class. Thus generalized competency model may be represented as: M C {Structure, Mastery, KAS, Urgency}. Due to demand of interoperability among learning systems that deal with competency information (human resource systems, learning content, competency or skills repositories) model elements description of competencies is supported by the IMS specification [5]. Such approach allows for expression of Mastery, KAS and Urgency facets. Object Orchestrator To support competency-based authoring, an OO (Object Orchestrator) tool [3] was chosen. Started as a simple open-source system for course development support, it was enhanced significantly to become now a core for a learning content management framework. Two key functionalities for resource development are supported in the OO: construction of the learning objects (learning object builder) and their description (metadata editor). As shown in Fig.1, metadata editor is a powerful tool which supports standard metadata schema for object description but also allows an author to change the schema, extending it to reflect specific features necessary for search and selection of the objects. Page 3 of 8
Page 1: COMPETENCIES DEVELOPMENT AND ENHANC
Page 5 and 6: Figure 2: Competency description sc
Page 7 and 8: The ELTEC competence-based structur

Competencies development and enhancement in ELTEC

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