Towards skills-based curriculum analytics: can we automate the recognition of prior learning?

In an era that will increasingly depend upon lifelong learning, the LA community will need to facilitate the movement and sharing of data and information across institutional and geographic boundaries. This will help us to recognise prior learning (RPL) and to personalise the learner experience. Here, we explore the utility of skills-based curriculum analytics and how it might facilitate the process of awarding RPL between two institutions. We explore the potential utility of combining natural language processing and skills taxonomies to map between subject descriptions for these two different institutions, presenting two algorithms we have developed to facilitate RPL and evaluating their performance. We draw attention to some of the issues that arise, listing areas that we consider ripe for future work in a surprisingly underexplored area.