Simon Grant's presentation to the Berlin Workshop 2010-12-01

1. 1
Competency:
MedBiquitous
and other ideas
Simon Grant
ICOPER – Competency SIG
Berlin
2010-12-01

2. MedBiquitous
“MedBiquitous creates technology standards to advance
healthcare education and competence assessment. Our
standards make it easy to exchange educational content and
track learner activities and profiles.
This makes healthcare education more effective, measurable
and accessible, saving organizations time and money in the
process.”

3. MedBiquitous
 Clear path to ANSI
 Has Dan Rehak et al. as technical advisors
 Includes other members of past competency initiatives
 I'm on their
– Competencies working group
– Educational Trajectory working group

4. MedBiq Competency specs
 Good decision to split the “object” from the “framework”
– “object” alias “definition” or “concept”
 This enables reuse of objects in different frameworks
 Frameworks can contain objects that are not necessarily
structured as MedBiq objects
 Specification is not yet finalised
– but likely to be soon
 General approach of staying within the known / required

5. Competency Object (1)
“Competency Object – an umbrella term used by the CWG
to describe any abstract statement of learning or
performance expectations, and information related to the
statement. Statements can be learning outcomes,
competencies per se, learning objectives, professional
roles, topics, classifications/collections, etc. The
Competency Object may include additional data to
expand on or support the statement. The Object is
abstract in the sense that it does not inherently contain
information about connections of the statement to
individuals or events or other objects.”

6. Competency Object (2)
 Based around their own healthcare LOM
– the usual ID, title, description
– but apparently no “level” included
 additional special sub-elements for
– category
• term + scheme + label as in Atom
– references
• specific references to the literature related to this
competency
– supporting information
• “formatted or lengthy descriptions”
– either linked, or in XHTML

7. Competency Object (3)
 MedBiq's Object does not explicitly distinguish
– context or conditions
– levels
– subject matter
– action verb
– (though these could be accommodated in “category”)
 No attempt to represent explicitly
– type (e.g. knowledge, skill, attitude)
– potential assessability
– relationship with assessment
– relationship to personal claim

8. Competency framework (1)
“an organized and structured representation of a set of
interrelated and purposeful competency objects”

9. Competency framework (2)
 Healthcare LOM
– includes the usual stuff, though much more than needed
 Supporting Information (optional)
– linked or formatted information as with Object
 any number of Relation elements
– ref 1
– relationship
• broader than
• narrower than
• related to
– ref2

10. Competency framework (3)
 No attempt yet by MedBiq to cover:
– relationships across frameworks, including equivalence
– the distinction within framework relationships between
• necessary constituent parts
• alternative ways of doing things
– relationships between objects and assessment
– relationships between objects and personal claims

11. Detailing natural language
 It is better to follow natural language and common usage
where that makes sense
 People routinely talk about
– different levels of the same competence
– different contexts or conditions of exercising that competence
 And if we don't follow that, we arrive in a land of
profligate proliferation of competence concepts
 But for agreement, we need also to analyse and
separate concepts
 And we have to stop somewhere...

13. An ISO SC36 model

18. JISC portfolio-related work
 Competence structures for (e-)portfolio tools
 Currently under review. If approved...
 Work will take place Feb – June 2011
 Exploratory implementation with portfolio tools
– based on currently used portfolio-related systems
• several have hierarchical structures of skill/competence
– initial draft specification to be agreed first
– prototyping starting from draft specification
– final specification
• represent what can usefully and practically be implemented
• not to go beyond envisaged portfolio implementation
• will try hard to harmonise with other initiatives

19. Thanks for your attention!
 I also work with
– eCOTOOL
– ICOPER
 Please consider yourselves invited to further dialogue
 blog series in progress
– http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/asimong/2010/11/19/the-logic-of-competence/
– just Google for: logic competence
 asimong@gmail.com
 http://www.slideshare.net/asimong