Competences

You could think of "skills", you could think of "competencies", you could certainly think of "intended learning outcomes", but however you think of this topic, it is about what people want to learn, beyond just knowledge, what employers want of employees, what courses may aim to provide -- the common language we need to relate personal and professional development, the associated learning, and the use in practice of what is learned.

Given that people are not clear about the concepts and meanings of terms in this area, one activity directly connected with the topic is building consensus conceptual models. As these are agreed, the way is expected to become clearer towards developing a specification to enable portfolio (and other related) tools to be decoupled from particular areas of personal or professional skill and competence.

We have a mailing list -- skill-competence@jiscmail.ac.uk -- and, given that interest is high across Europe and internationally, we are sharing some wiki space with European colleagues.

This topic is key to JISC's Curriculum Design and to a lesser extent the Curriculum Delivery programmes within the overall e-Learning programme, and should also relate to other programmes such as Business and Community Engagement.