Recruitment and Educational Alignment Use Cases for Competency Frameworks

Competency frameworks describe the knowledge, skills, and behavior needed to perform in a given field or role. Organizations and individuals have numerous use cases for competency assessment. Post-secondary educational institutions and training providers also have use cases for industry- and discipline-specific competency frameworks. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has used competency frameworks for both organizational uses and individual assessment purposes. While these uses are briefly touched on, the focus of this paper is on use of competency frameworks for communicating employer needs to education providers for recruitment purposes and for aligning curricula to meet discipline-specific competency requirements. LANL’s approach to developing and managing competency frameworks for several types of technicians is described, as is the use case methodology.

Educational Alignment: Learning – Teaching Approaches as Influencing Factors

<p>La implementación de innovaciones en programas académicos de medicina requiere evaluar los aspectos que cumplen papeles fundamentales dentro de la compleja relación del sistema estudiante-docente-contexto educativo. El objetivo del artículo es determinar si los objetivos de aprendizaje y las intervenciones educativas concuerdan con el alineamiento educativo. Este se puede evaluar explorando el abordaje del aprendizaje adoptado por los estudiantes (profundo <em>vs.</em> superficial) y el abordaje de enseñanza adoptado por los miembros del cuerpo docente (centrado en estudiantes <em>vs.</em> centrado en docentes). Un alineamiento entre estos factores asegura una mayor calidad del programa educativo, que fomenta el desarrollo de profesionales con capacidad de autoestudio y autorregulación, en busca de aprendizajes significativos continuos a lo largo de la vida. Así mismo, programas en proceso de cambios curriculares deben evaluar estos aspectos que antes no estaban en los currículos tradicionales. </p>

Teaching in Vocational Schools: Educational Alignment versus the Promotion of Talents

Teaching and learning has fundamentally changed in the last thirty years. In this period, a wide range of novel teaching theories has been established. Recent research states that a teachers professional identity consists of a cognitive, psychological and also a social perspective. The identity of a teacher emerges when s/he interacts with his/her students or other people. As a result of these interactions, teachers treat the questions “who are they? and who do they want to become?. These questions pose different views on educational methodologies today. On the one side some professionals argue for learning in a community which supports establishing an average basis of knowledge among all pupils. This approach especially helps the struggling pupils, since a key component is that pupils learn from each other and align their knowledge. On the other side, however, others vote for an individual learning program. Here, in particular talents are promoted. The question is, what approach is more promising for the society of tomorrow. This work deals with the underlying theories, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these learning theories and, as an example, additionally incorporates a focused view on the Austrian education system