The Competencies tool enables you to assess learning outcomes and determine whether users have really acquired the knowledge, skills or abilities a learning experience is supposed to provide. Competencies track information about the knowledge, skills and abilities the people in your organization acquire as they participate in courses or other learning experiences.
Some examples might include:
The types of competencies you decide to model and track depend on your institution and what you ultimately want to do with the information.
Your institution might use a different vocabulary to describe "competencies", such as: proficiencies, learning outcomes, standards, objectives, or skills. Learning objectives might be known as: indicators, criteria, requirements, or learning outcomes.
A competency is a structure composed of different elements in a hierarchy:
When a user completes all the activities in a learning objective, they achieve the objective, and when they achieve all the objectives in a competency, they achieve the competency. In this way they complete the competency from the bottom up by passing each of the activities at the base of the structure.
A competency must contain at least one of each sub-elements; objective and activity.
Learning objectives represent the things a person needs to learn to acquire a competency—the skills, abilities or knowledge a person must acquire to become competent in a given domain. More complex competencies contain multiple learning objectives.
A competency, such as fluency in conversational German, might require knowledge of vocabulary, basic grammar, pronunciation, understanding spoken words, etc.
A competency such as Media Literacy is so broad in scope that it might contain multiple levels of learning objectives. The highest level objective might include "Awareness of Advertising Techniques," which might be broken down into sub-objectives of its own. You can do this by creating multiple levels of learning objectives, or by creating sub-competencies (one competency nested beneath another).
Activities are what you use to evaluate learning objectives. They are the tests or evidence that measure a person’s completion of a learning objective. You can use multiple activities to evaluate a learning objective. Users must pass all of the activities associated with a learning objective to complete it.
In Learning Environment, activities can be quizzes, surveys, dropbox folders, discussion topics and grade items. Or they can exist independently without being tied to any other tool in Learning Environment. This gives you the opportunity to use existing tools to assess learning objectives and the flexibility to draw on other forms of assessment, such as an in-person demonstration.
Activities are the only elements that are actually graded. To complete an activity, a user’s assessment must meet the minimum required level for that activity. This means competencies have no grades or levels of achievement—they are either complete or they are not. It doesn’t matter if one person achieves the highest levels on all activities, while another meets only the minimum thresholds; in the competency model, both are equal. You can think of competencies as an inventory of skills or knowledge a person has, rather than a measure of how good someone is at something.
You can create competencies inside course offerings or within other types of org units.
If you create a competency as part of a course offering, it is accessible only within that course offering, just like any other tool in Learning Environment. This can be an effective way to ensure that users taking a course master all the material in that course: you can create a competency to represent the entire course, and create learning objectives to represent each unit then associate each of these units with multiple activities (a test and an essay, say), requiring users to pass the test and the essay for every unit. They would have to learn all the course material to complete the course competency. In this way, competencies have an advantage over traditional grading mechanisms based on overall averages, which can mask significant gaps in comprehension.
You can also create competencies inside other types of org units, like a department, a semester, or the organization as a whole, which enables you to track users’ achievements beyond individual course offerings. When you create a competency outside of a course offering, you can share it with multiple course offerings and use different activities to evaluate the competency’s learning objectives inside each offering. This enables users to complete the competency in stages over time, working on different learning objectives within different courses, which is useful if the competency is large or complex and acquiring all the knowledge or skills associated with it involve many learning experiences.
Within an org unit, click the Competencies link in the navigation bar.