Leveraging Linked Data to Propel Competency-Based Education Based on Labour Skills

Abstract

Recently, there is a debate on the credentials that is more important for the individuals; their education and certificates or their competences and skills. Competency-based education (CBE) is a paradigm that can combine the both benefits. Linked data technology has potentials that help education to be more oriented towards CBE by linking the education with competences fields such as labour. However, that needs the education courses to be updated according to labours' demands which require lifelong learning to make individuals kept up with the emerging competences and technologies. CBE and lifelong learning are related to open education such as OCWs, MOOCs and OERs; since MOOCs for example give the chance to learn from the industry leaders which is very effective for CBE and can be acquired anytime. Also, open education is more responsive to the emerging demands of labour. Based on that, traditional universities have a possibility to update their courses based on the CBE rather than starting from scratch. Therefore, making mutual integration between traditional and open education courses based on labours' competences can offer an opportunity to go towards CBE. In this paper we propose a novel approach to refine education courses to be more oriented towards CBE by this mutuality integration. Input to this approach is the course information and the output is lists of candidate competences concepts that a course designer can use to refine current courses' topics and learning outcomes based on labour skills. Also developing a new metrics is suggested based on conducting some statistics to measure the importance of the concept regarding the CBE and measure how much the whole course is related to the labour needs. Lastly, developing a bridged model based on the competences concepts to be as anchors is suggested to provide links to the related OERs and related courses from MOOCS/OCWs.