METADATA FOR DESCRIBING EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCIES:

THE UOC CASE

Ana-Elena Guerrero

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Av. Tibidabo 39-43, 08035 Barcelona, Spain

Juli

a Minguill

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Av. Tibidabo 39-43, 08035 Barcelona, Spain

Keywords:

E-learning, competencies, metadata, learning design, standards, LOM, IMS-LD, ontologies.

Abstract:

In this paper we describe a proposal for standardizing the concept of competency in a repository of learning

objects, by means of an extension of the LOM and the IMS-LD standards, and the use of ontologies for ensur-

ing consistency is also outlined. Following the recommendations from the Bologna Process, we identify the

competencies required and developed by means of the current learning resources and formative and evaluation

activities in a virtual e-learning environment and, using the most important taxonomies deﬁned for such pur-

poses in the literature, we identify the necessary metadata to describe the competencies related to such learning

resources and activities. We discuss the process of shifting from content based metadata to competency based

metadata, and we present an example of improving the description of learning resources by adding metadata

for describing competencies, using a real case at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, with the creation of the new European

Higher Education Area, also known as the Bologna

Process, it becomes necessary to shift from heavily

content-based courses to others where the concept of

activity is the key. Contents, or learning resources in

general, will become secondary pieces in the learning

process, while the activities and the competencies de-

veloped by such activities will become the focus of

any formative action. In order to do so, it is neces-

sary to achieve an agreement for describing both con-

tents and competencies as well, by means of meta-

data. It is also important to promote the formal ac-

knowledgement of skills, knowledge and competen-

cies gained through work experience, informal train-

ing and life experience, for prior learning recognition

purposes. From the Bologna Declaration, ”A Europe

of Knowledge is now widely recognized as an irre-

placeable factor for social and human growth and as

an indispensable component to consolidate and en-

rich the European citizenship, capable of giving its

citizens the necessary competencies to face the chal-

lenges of the new millennium, together with an aware-

ness of shared values and belonging to a common so-

cial and cultural space”, lifelong learning becomes a

clear objective, using a competency-based approach

for designing personalized formative itineraries. In

this paper we describe a proposal for describing com-

petencies using standardized metadata, with the aim

of promoting both formative and evaluation activities

based on competencies.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 de-

scribes the virtual e-learning environment of the Uni-

versitat Oberta de Catalunya. Section 3 reviews the

concept of competency in the literature and describes

the basic taxonomies adopted for metadata. In Sec-

tion 4, a proposal for the standardization of compe-

tencies through the use of metadata is outlined by ex-

tending the LOM and IMS-LD standards, and the use

of ontologies is also addressed. Section 5 shows a

case of study about acquiring basic competencies. Fi-

nally, the conclusions of this paper and the research

lines are summarized in Section 6.

2 THE UOC VIRTUAL CAMPUS

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Sangr

a, 2002)

(UOC, in English known as Open University of Cat-

alonia) is a completely online university which of-

fers 19 ofﬁcial degrees, several graduate programs

and post-graduate studies, and a doctoral degree, with

more than 35000 students and more than 1500 peo-

275

Guerrero A. and Minguillón J. (2006).

METADATA FOR DESCRIBING EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCIES: THE UOC CASE.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and

e-Government / e-Learning, pages 275-280

DOI: 10.5220/0001243902750280

 SciTePress

ple including instructional designers, teachers, tutors,

academic and technical staff, and so. The UOC vir-

tual campus is an integrated e-learning environment

which allows users to communicate with other users

using a mail system, and includes an agenda, a news

service, virtual classrooms, a digital library and other

e-learning related tools. Each subject has a virtual

classroom with all the needed elements for the de-

velopment of the learning/teaching process: e-mail,

access to documentation, the activity based teaching

plan model, access to evaluation results, access to the

teacher board, forums, debates, etc. The “Teaching

Plan” document acts as a contract between the student

and the university, and it establishes the minimum re-

quirements (in terms of learning objectives, activities

and so) that the student needs to know in order to suc-

cessfully pass the subject he or she is enrolled to. This

document is also a guide for helping students to pre-

pare their learning strategy according to the planned

activities during the academic semester in advance.

The teaching plan is the ﬁrst step towards a com-

plete formalization of the learning process with the

help of the appropriate standard descriptions. The use

of e-learning standards for both content description

and structuring will allow the inclusion of complex

learning strategies such as personalization, for exam-

ple (Mor and Minguill

on, 2004). Currently, courses

are structured using contents as the basic pieces for

building formative itineraries, but this must be also

addressed from a competency based point of view.

2.1 From Content to Competencies

In fact, both the learning materials and the teaching

plan include a set of learning objectives that should

be achieved by the students at the end of the aca-

demic semester. There is also a set of guided activ-

ities that students must perform in order to achieve

such learning objectives. These activities have a dou-

ble goal: ﬁrst, they are designed to be formative ac-

tivities, and second, they also serve for both student

evaluation and self-evaluation. The learning objec-

tives described there are evaluated through such activ-

ities, thus directly related to the competencies needed

to achieve the desired results. Therefore, it is pos-

sible to use such information to determine the com-

petencies required and developed by each learning

resource and the associated activities. On the other

hand, and from an instructional design point of view

(van Merrienboer, 2001), it is necessary to integrate

skills, knowledge and attitudes into professional com-

petencies, altogether with the differentiation of vari-

ous types of competencies. Content should be com-

plemented with the appropriate metadata in order to

describe such issues. Following the ideas described

in (S

anchez-Alonso and Sicilia, 2005), our goal is to

provide a complete description of the competencies

(both required and provided by) for any learning ob-

ject used to build formative itineraries fulﬁlling all the

desired requirements.

3 LEARNING COMPETENCIES

Students in higher education need to acquire a set of

competencies through established training actions and

they have to be able to demonstrate them at the end of

the course. For such purpose, it is necessary to as-

sume a teaching and learning methodology centered

in the student, where all the teaching actions are de-

signed to promote reaching the established compe-

tency goals. Therefore, in any formative action, it

will be necessary to design the content according to

such purpose, as well as some activities focused to-

wards practicing with the acquired knowledge and the

reached abilities during the training activity. In order

to do so, it is a key issue to identify what the compe-

tencies are, and which of them must be reached as a

learning result, in order to design contents, learning

resources and formative and evaluation activities.

3.1 Basic Deﬁnitions

In general, a competency is deﬁned as “a speciﬁc

range of skill, knowledge, or ability to perform an ac-

tivity”. Competencies are one step beyond abilities

and skills, and is the term preferred to describe com-

binations of attributes that describe the level or degree

to which a person is capable of performing them. As it

is well known, European educational institutions are

evolving through the Bologna process towards a con-

vergent European system, working together towards

a new educational paradigm centered in the student,

and also taking into account another goals, such the

description of the qualiﬁcations in terms of load work,

learning results, achieved competencies and proﬁles.

At this stage, the concept of competency is being

widely discussed, but the deﬁnition more recognized,

as stated in the Tuning project report (Gonz

alez and

Wagenaar, 2003), is already a de facto standard: “the

competencies tend to convey meaning in reference to

what a person is capable or competent of, the de-

gree of preparation, sufﬁciency and/or responsibility

for certain tasks”. The complexity of subject falls in

how the design of contents has to be done with respect

to competencies in e-learning (Kirschner and Paas,

2001), understanding that e-learning in virtual envi-

ronments is learning through Internet, which plays an

important role in the delivery, support, administration

and assessment of learning itself (Bates, 2000).

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3.2 Taxonomies for Competencies

Several taxonomies for classifying competencies can

be found in the literature. Among those, the well-

known Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) classiﬁes

the educational goals and objectives on three do-

mains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. This

taxonomy of learning behaviors can be thought of as

”the goals of the training process”. That is, after the

training session, the learner should have acquired new

skills, knowledge, and/or attitudes. Based upon these

three domains, Bloom classiﬁes the competencies that

a student can reach in different levels, depending on

the domain. In particular, for the cognitive domain,

Bloom identiﬁes six levels, going from a simple recall

or recognition of facts as the lowest, to the highest

order, which is classiﬁed as evaluation. Bloom cre-

ates relationships between competencies and demon-

strated skills, in a pyramidal structure (from bottom to

top): knowledge, comprehension, application, analy-

sis, synthesis an evaluation. Each competency in the

pyramid is supposed to include all the lower compe-

tencies. The ﬁrst three competencies are supposed

to be basic, while the acquisition of the second three

competencies needs advanced skills from the student.

Regarding the affective domain, Bloom deﬁnes ﬁve

levels, namely: perception, response, valuing, orga-

nization and characterization. Unlike the cognitive

domain, there is not a clear relationship between the

levels and their degrees, although Bloom states that

they follow the same pyramidal structure. Finally, as

a practical guide for classifying a learning objective

into a competency level, Bloom uses the verb in the

learning objective as the key for classiﬁcation. We

have adopted this simple procedure because almost

every learning resource used at UOC has one or more

learning objectives described using key verbs such as

identify, compare or justify, for example.

Another feasible taxonomy is the classiﬁcation

about competencies described in the Tuning project

(Gonz

alez and Wagenaar, 2003). As in Bloom’s tax-

onomy, this taxonomy states that a typical student

does not either possesses or lacks a competency in ab-

solute terms, so that competencies can be placed on a

continuum. Based upon this fact, competencies are

classiﬁed in two types: general competencies, which

are considered important and common by everyone

and to all degrees, and speciﬁc competencies that are

related with a subject area and also to speciﬁc knowl-

edge of a ﬁeld of study. The general competencies are

structured in three different kinds: instrumental com-

petencies, such as elementary computing skills; inter-

personal competencies, such as the ability of work-

ing in an interdisciplinary team; and systemic compe-

tencies, such as the capacity for applying knowledge

practically, or the capacity to adapt to new situations.

Other studies remark that the continuous evolution

of learning technologies requires new competencies

and the need to incorporate them, depending on the

role adopted by each user at any stage of the learning

process. We use the student’s role as the center for

the design of the competencies related to learning re-

sources, following the UOC’s pedagogical model. In

any case, like some experts say, the competencies are

an integrated whole of knowledge, skills and attitudes

(Kirschner et al., 1997) and, as recently stated in (Re-

ichert and Tauch, 2005), “the added value of Bologna

reforms is that it offers the opportunity from concen-

trating more in the needs and the competencies of the

students”. Therefore, it is important to focus on intro-

ducing a model of teaching and learning centered on

the student and based on the acquisition of competen-

cies. For that, it is necessary to identify the general

and speciﬁc competencies for each subject, and also

the teaching and learning resources and activities in

order to reach them. Notice that both taxonomies are

not completely orthogonal, so there is some degree of

overlapping. Nevertheless, both the Bloom and the

Tuning taxonomies are useful for describing compe-

tencies from different points of view, thus using both

of them.

4 METADATA FOR DESCRIBING

COMPETENCIES

In this section we describe a proposal for integrat-

ing the concept of competency following the taxon-

omy developed in the previous section into the cur-

rent e-learning standards in use at the UOC virtual

e-learning environment. The description of the ele-

ments of any e-learning process and all the interac-

tions between such elements is not a simple ques-

tion. Two basic levels of description can be identiﬁed:

the ﬁrst level, pointed towards content management

through the use of learning objects, describes the as-

pects directly related to the educational content. The

second level describes the interactions between such

learning objects and the users within the framework

deﬁned by the learning process. This separation is

needed to ensure reutilization of learning resources in

different contexts.

4.1 The LOM Standard

For the ﬁrst level, the LOM (Learning Object Meta-

data) standard deﬁnes a structure for interoperable de-

scriptions of learning objects. In this case, a learning

object is deﬁned as any entity, digital or non-digital,

that may be used for learning, education or training.

Notice that we do not use the classical deﬁnition of

learning object from Wiley (Wiley, 2002) because it

does not include non-digital resources, which are still

METADATA FOR DESCRIBING EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCIES: THE UOC CASE

277

heavily used at the UOC virtual campus. Neverthe-

less, although there are several other deﬁnitions for

learning objects, all of them coincide in a single de-

sired behavior: reusability (Polsani, 2003).

Metadata for a learning object describes relevant

characteristics of such learning object to which ap-

plies, pursuing reusability. Regarding the LOM stan-

dard, such characteristics may be grouped in nine cat-

egories, namely: general, life cycle, meta-metadata,

educational, technical, educational, rights, relation,

annotation, and classiﬁcation. For our purposes, the

“educational” and “classiﬁcation” categories are the

possible targets for extending the LOM standard to in-

clude descriptors about competencies, instead of the

“annotation” category, which is mostly used for un-

structured descriptions. Finally, although it is not nec-

essary, it is also possible to add the appropriate data

to the “meta-metadata” category to identify the source

of the proposed extension.

4.2 Extending the LOM Standard

Following the directions given in the previous sec-

tions, Table 1 resumes the new elements added to

the LOM standard for describing a competency: an

optional textual description and a combination of

Bloom and Tuning descriptors. For each element,

its name, size (or cardinality) and its type or the

set of possible values are shown. The level (depen-

dencies) of the new element is also shown, in or-

der to clarify whether an element is present or not

depending on the value of its root element. For

example, both the TuningSpecificLevel and

TuningSpecificDescription elements have

only sense if a speciﬁc competency has been speci-

ﬁed through the use of the TuningSpecificName

element, within another TuningSpecific one.

Notice that we have not included metadata for the

psychomotor competencies as described in Bloom

(Bloom, 1956), although its implementation is

straightforward following the same approach, in case

of other educational environment requirements. Cur-

rently now, we have also discarded to include a con-

ﬁdence value as deﬁned in (S

anchez-Alonso and Si-

cilia, 2005), because its usage is not clear and it might

generate doubts in the teachers adopting this proposal

for describing competencies. Regarding the taxon-

omy used for identifying the possible verbs describing

cognitive competencies, it can be found in (Bloom,

1956), but it could be extended if needed.

For describing the required competencies, that

is, the competencies that a student needs to per-

form a certain activity, they can be incorporated

into the proposal using the same approach, adding

a new level of description, one for required com-

petencies (“requires”) and other for developed

(“develops”). These competencies identify the

minimum requirements in competency terms of the

learning contents used to further develop other com-

petencies. Although required competencies are de-

ﬁned by instructional designers and teachers, accord-

ing to their expertise, it is also possible to determine

some of them from the competencies described in Ta-

ble 1, using the appropriate set of rules deﬁned in an

ontology about competencies. For example, as stated

in (Gonz

alez and Wagenaar, 2003), systemic compe-

tencies require as a base the prior acquisition of in-

strumental and interpersonal competencies.

Finally, for describing speciﬁc competencies di-

rectly related to narrow knowledge areas, it is better

to use available taxonomies when possible. For exam-

ple, for learning resources used in the Computer Sci-

ence degree, the 1998 extended ACM taxonomy

used (at the UOC) to describe the speciﬁc content cat-

egories, while the MeSH taxonomy

is widely used to

describe medical terms. UOC is currently redeﬁning

the taxonomies for all the knowledge areas, in order

to establish a common language for describing all the

learning contents in the virtual campus.

4.3 The IMS-LD Standard

The IMS-LD (Learning Design) standard tries to de-

scribe the aspects more related to the learning process

in itself, such as sequencing or role playing, that is,

the second level of description as aforementioned. It

seems clear that this information cannot be stored in

the learning objects, but in a higher semantic level.

Although the IMS-LD standard may seem too com-

plex, its ﬂexibility and multilevel description capa-

bilities allow the speciﬁcation of any learning pro-

cess ranging from simple educational itineraries to

complex learning processes including personalization

and collaborative working capabilities. In IMS-LD,

“Learning-objectives” within an “Activity” is pre-

cisely the place to describe competencies, but using

a more textual approach. Each learning objective is

described using, at least, two basic ﬁelds, a text based

description and a type, which can be one (and only

one) of the following: skill, knowledge, insight, at-

titude, competency and other. Therefore, any exten-

sion to include a more comprehensive description of

competencies should be included here, using the pro-

posal presented in this paper. IMS-LD will proba-

bly become a standard for deﬁning complex learn-

ing processes, including personalization issues, and

so. Therefore, it would be interesting to study how

to include our proposal in the IMS-LD standard tak-

ing also into account not only competencies but also

activities and roles.

http://www.acm.org/class

http://medline.cos.com/mesh/main.shtml

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Table 1: New metadata elements for describing a single competency.

Level Name Size Type

1 CompetencyDescription 0or1 any text

2 Bloom 0or1 —

2.1 BloomCognitive 0or1 {knowledge, comprehension, application,

analysis, synthesis, evaluation}

2.1.1 BloomCognitiveVerb any taxonomy

2.2 BloomAffective 0or1 {perception, response, valuing, organization,

characterization}

3 Tuning 0or1 —

3.1 TuningGeneral 0or1 {instrumental, interpersonal, systemic}

3.1.1 TuningInstrumental 0or1 {cognitive, methodological, technological, linguis-

tic}

3.2 TuningSpecific any —

3.2.1 TuningSpecificName 1 taxonomy

3.2.2 TuningSpecificDescription 0or1 any text

3.2.3 TuningSpecificLevel 0or1 {basic, medium, advanced }

4.4 Integration Using Ontologies

The use of ontologies for standard integration and

extension is a common tool in the semantic web

ﬁeld. As described in (Sicilia and Garc

ıa-Barriocanal,

2003), it is possible to use an ontology for describing

not only standards, but also the relationships that oc-

cur between the elements that take part of such stan-

dards, which cannot be part of the learning object

instances, providing coherence to metadata instances

and referring to the appropriate domains. The other

possible use of ontologies, and perhaps more interest-

ing, is to ensure consistency and to help users to create

the metadata for a learning object, using a set of rules

for both automatic metadata data ﬁlling and valida-

tion. If OWL (Web Ontology Language) (McGuin-

ness and van Harmelen, 2004) is used for describing

the ontology, it is possible to use an OWL reasoner

and any other rule based language to establish all the

constraints related to the LOM standard and compe-

tencies, such as RuleML or SWRL (Semantic Web

Rule Language), for example. Using the latter, rules

can be described as Antecedents ⇒ Consequents, fol-

lowing a human readable syntaxis. For example, the

fact that if a general competency is classiﬁed as one

of the possible values for the instrumental category,

its general category has to be speciﬁed and be indeed

instrumental.

5 EXAMPLE OF USE

In order to exemplify the proposal described in the

previous section, we provide a basic example for a

learning resource about working collaboratively for

searching, selecting and creating a report about one

particular subject in the Computer Science degree.

This goal is structured in three continuous assessment

activities and one ﬁnal practical exercise, and a basic

competency for making searches through the web is

required (denoted by H.3.0.a in the ACM taxonomy).

On the other hand, the same competency is developed

altogether with others more speciﬁc about using In-

ternet for searching, content selection and so (H.3.3).

<TuningSpecificLevel>basic</>

</TuningSpecific>

</Tuning>

</Requires>

</Competency>

<Bloom>

<BloomAffective>characterization</>

</Bloom>

<TuningGeneral>interpersonal</>

</Tuning>

</Competency>

<TuningGeneral>interpersonal</>

<TuningSpecificLevel>medium</>

</TuningSpecific>

</TuningSpecific>

</Tuning>

</Competency>

</Develops>

</Competencies>

METADATA FOR DESCRIBING EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCIES: THE UOC CASE

279

5.1 Proposal Validation

Although the example shown above is far from being

a complete proof for validating the proposal, it can

be used as a basic guide for its evaluation. In fact,

all the learning resources available at the UOC virtual

campus are undergoing a reviewing process, includ-

ing metadata for describing both content and com-

petencies. Currently now, this represents more than

one thousand text books and other learning resources

which will be probably fragmented in several learning

units, which will be the basic pieces of the learning

objects repository. To implement this example, ﬁrst

it is necessary to identify the competencies required

and developed in the teaching and learning for each

learning resource, using learning objectives as basic

sentences to determine the right category through the

verbs used in each learning objective, as well as the

more suitable learning resources for the design of the

activities. On the other hand, for each degree and

knowledge area, the speciﬁc competencies must also

be identiﬁed. Finally, the use of the proposal pre-

sented in this paper arises several issues that must be

addressed in order to improve the metadata that iden-

tify a learning object, and consequently, the reposi-

tories, focussing the contents, the activities and the

learning resources towards the future of the European

Higher Education Area, based on the acquisition of

competencies. This proposal could also improve the

reusability of the learning objects by means of valu-

able metadata.

6 CONCLUSION

Since the Bologna declaration in 1999, and with the

appearance of the concept of competency, it becomes

necessary to rethink the whole learning process from

a content based point of view to another more user

centered, based on activities requiring and develop-

ing competencies. In this paper we have described a

proposal for standardizing the concept of competency

using the LOM standard and a XML extension which

can be also used in IMS-LD. The use of ontologies for

both standard integration and validation and an exam-

ple of usage have also been outlined.

Current and further research in this topic should

include the complete description of the proposed ex-

tension using an ontology, in order to ensure a better

formalization of the concept of competency and sim-

plify the process of adding it to any other e-learning

standard such as LOM and IMS-LD. The learning

resources available at UOC are being currently re-

viewed in order to add metadata for educational pur-

poses, so we expect to validate our proposal with a

large repository of learning objects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is partially supported by Spanish govern-

ment grant MULTIMARK TIC2003-08064-C04-04.

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