SEMINAR with guest professor Alex Wiseman:
Global Perspectives on Competency-bases Education and Policy, Jun 4-6th 2014
From June 4th to June 6th Prof. Alex Wiseman, guest professor from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, USA, held a seminar for master students titled "Global Perspectives on Competency-based Education and Policy". This seminar explored that fact that moving not only from school to work, but also across life stages and cultures, is significant because formal mass education and the labor market have become disconnected to the point that they comprise distinct cultures. The question then is one of how to link educational an labor market cultures. The solution fom policymakers increasingly is competency frameworks in education, but there is rarely a suggested concession or adjustment on the part of industry. This one-sided relationship suggests the the labor market culture is dominant, but if so, then why does formal mass education seem to be so persistently resistant to shifting culturally more closely toward industry. The solution to this problem has been a recent swing back towards competency-based qualifications and educational framework in national educational systems, labor markets, and individual training and development around the world.
To understand these phenomena, seminar participants learned to 1) define what a competency-based qualification framework is; 2) to compare various theoretical perspectives on National Qualification Frameworks (NQF) and competencies; 3) to describe the shared characteristics of NQFs in 16 countries, and think about what an archetype might look like; 4) to identify and unterstand some of the major concepts related to NQFs and competency-based qualifications, including competency, standards, qualification, framework, policy borrowing, education-labor market link, stakeholders, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), comparative methods/problems, diploma desease, outcomes-based, etc.; and 5) to recognize the difference between an education culture of competency and a labor market/industry culture of competency.
Prof. Wiseman offers his sincere congratulations on accomplishing so much in such a short amount of time!