Purpose
The framework architecture's purpose is to describe learner's pathway at very generic level so that the framework can be deployed across the member countries of European Union.
The learner's pathway can be seen as a value stream which increments learner's competences and, thus, value in some sense. While the value stream is from learner's perspective the services the learner uses on the path are produced by other actors. The services the learner uses are pinned on the path to tell when the learner uses the service in question. By expanding achitecture of the services the framework guides what is needed to implement the services and it is up to a user of the framework architecture to define how the services are actually implemented. To guide in implementation the framework architecture includes an example how this framework is implemented in Finland.
To whom this document is meant for
The document is meant for strategy leaders and developers working in education sector.
Conventions in the document
CompLeap vision
The project aims to build a learner-centred ecosystem of digital services and products around skills and competences to better match skills supply and labour market needs, serving individual citizens, employers, decision-makers and, ultimately, the society at large. More specifically, the project aims to empower the citizen to take ownership of their skills development by offering them an opportunity to plan their own learner pathway based on enhanced self-awareness, improved recognition practices and responsive education offer. Furthermore, the skills formation will be based on national competence requirements reflecting the needs of the labor market.
TEST
Strategy Map
Strategy map links drivers, strategic goals, business outcomes and capabilities together. Drivers motivate for business shift and strategic goals are long term development targets meeting the environment change. Business outcomes are concrete results realizing the strategic goals in short term development. Needed capabilities tell what capabilities organization needs to realize business outcomes. Capability appears when its different dimensions are developed. The different dimensions are people, processes and material. Development of people dimension includes development of personal competences, development of processes include processes, concepts and information management and development of material dimension includes infrastructure, information technology and equipment.
Architecture Principles
Architecture principles guide organization development towards strategic goals. Every development decision should be aligned with principles. The power of principles is that everyone can utilized them in their everyday work and work towards strategic goals.
Development Requirements
CompLeap project development requirements describe what is needed to increase the recognized capabilities in the project.
CompLeap Actors and their Roles
The learner's pathway actors and roles are described above. Learner is the center role in the framework architecture and the the learner acts in different specialized roles in the leaner's pathway. The learner can potential applicant, applicant, student or graduated depending on at what stage the learner is in the learner's pathway. Learner can be potentially any citizen of European Union and the citizens are divided into different categories to focus services for them depending on their life situation. From the value stream point of view main actors producing more value to the leaner are education provider and employer. Education provider offers services to increase learners competencies and employer provides possibility to utilize the competences and turn competences to actual value.
Education provider acts in different roles, namely in vendor, legal entity of education and guidance, depending on what education provider's service the learner is using.
Employer acts in different roles to provide competence requirements and feedback.
CompLeap Project Actors
Compleap project actors are described above. From the framework point of view the roles are meaningful and the implementer of the framework should consider what roles are required to implement the framework and what are the actors or stakeholders in each role.
Business Service Map
Framework's business services are described above. In this framework business service produces value to the learner. The learner starts using the business service by contacting the actor producing the service. The contacting may occur via different channels which are up to an implementer to define. Some of the services require that the learner has to give some information as input to the service and the learner gets information back. Some of the services produce information for the other services to be utilized in the learner's pathway and some services give actual value increment to the learner. The while the business services may be fully automated there is still need for person-to-person interaction and, thus, service design should take other actors in account when applications are defined.
Compleap project focuses on the business services with green ovals around, namely Career and study guidance, Education offer, Comparing opportunities and Competence mapping. The project aims to create application prototypes for the named business services and the applications gives an possibility to use services via World Wide Web. The framework architecture and its implementation helps prototype implementation to give holistic view of all services and possible data streams so that data can utilized everywhere in the learner's path and the learner does not need to input same data many times on the path.
Guidance and Personalisation service area includes business services to help individuals to identify their competences and what competences they are missing and what course of actions they should take to improve their competence.
Admission service area includes business services to admit into education or other competence development.
Learning and studying service area includes business services to improve competence.
Feedback service area includes business services to give feedback about the competence development at any stage.
Employment service area includes business services to collect information about employment offer. This area could contain business service for applying to work but it is left out intentionally because of the perspective and scope of the framework.
Identity and myData service area contains business services to identify learner, to manage learner's personal data and consents.
Statistics and analytics service are contains business services to manage statistical and analytical data to provide information to different management levels.
Digital Learner Pathway - Main Business Process
Learner's pathway is described above. The learner's pathway is main business process or value stream in the framework. The value stream defines the steps the learner takes to increment hers or his competence. The value stream begins from anticipation of needed skills where the learner somehow recognizes the need for new skills or competences. The learner may use guidance at every stage of the leaner's pathway and the guidance could give impulses to the learner at every stage to guide the learner to right direction. After the anticipation of needed skills the learner may do planning or do pre education personal competence development planning. The difference between the planning and pre education competence development planning is that the planning is not well structured process while the pre education personal competence development planning process is. The planning is more ad hoc and flexible and depends on the learner how to planning is done or if it is done at all. The pre education personal competence development planning is defined by legal entity of the education and is formal way to do planning at that stage. (Miten pre education... eroaa planningistä? Onko oikean suuntainen arvaus?) After planning the learner does education mapping and after finding proper education, the learner enters to admissions. After admissions the learner acquires competences and finally uses the competences. During acquiring the competences and using the competences the learner does personal competence development planning all the time. The personal competence development planning is also formal process defined by legal entity of the education which guides the learner to do planning all the time. While the learner may do other kind of planning also, the formal planning provides common tools and information to do planning in competence development scope.
Skill vs. competence? Kumpaa termiä kannattaisi käyttää?
Digital Learner Pathway - Main and Sub Business Processes
Learner pathway's sub business processes are described above. The sub processes clarify the main processes and tell in more detail what steps the learner takes in the learner's path.
Planning process is divided into three steps. Namely, identification of personal interests, self evaluation of my competences and automated identification of prior learning. (automated viittaa jo ratkaisuun? Jos koko oppijan polku on tarkoitus digitalisoida, niin tarvitseeko korostaa tässä että on automatisoitu tämä vaihe?). The sub processes are described in more detail later.
Admissions are divided into application procedure and student selection sub processes.
Acquiring competence is divided into recognition of prior learning, showing non-verified competence and assessment, and acquiring missing competences sub processes.
Digital learner pathway: Main Business processes and services
Learner's pathway supporting business services are described above. The business services are pinned to the learner's pathway using the arrow notation. The notation describes at which stage of the learner's pathway the business service is utilized. For example learner uses competence mapping business service during planning process.
Main and Sub Business Processes and Services
Impact (vaikutus?) and Socioeconomic effect (yhteiskunnallinen vaikuttavuus?)
Learner's life situation is modeled in the framework architecture with a concept of realities. The concept includes anything concerning the learner's capabilities to work or study or to achieve learner's goals in general. Measuring the learner's capabilities is not an easy task but some can be approached with available data. For example if the potential applicant applies to studies and is accepted, the learner might get some student benefits like study allowance or cheaper accomodations or cheaper public transport tickets. On the other hand when the learner starts to study full-time, the learner might need to leave current work or start doing part-time work.This kind of realities can be modeled as currency flows in the learner's life. The changes in the currency flows are one sort of impact in the learner's life situation.
In general, impact can be thought as the changes in the realities in time. The impact in the learner's life is different depending on at what stage the learner is in the learner's pathway. While the learner can utilize the knowledge of impact when doing short term planning, the actual goal is to reach impact after the studies. In other words, long term impact.
In the framework architecture the long term impact can be defined as a change in learner's realities when learner begins the learner's pathway and ends the learner's pathway. The impact is not immediate when the learner begins utilizing the new acquired competences, so there should be some reasonable time to assess the impact after the studies.
Predicting the learner's short term impact might be possible if there is enough realities data available on different life situations. Predicting the learner's long term impact requires vaste amount of information like prediction about the job market situation after the studies, prediction of employment possibilities and so on. The system could also learn by time what kind of impact the learners have after traveling through learner's pathway. Comparing similar learner's meaning similar competence profiles, intents and goals, the impact estimation could be based on those. The impact estimation could be used in simulation how the choices in the learner's pathway would affect in short term and in long term. The simulation could help learner to make decisions for her or his good. If the prediction is not reliable and brings some ethical issues whether this kind of guidance is acceptable
The socioeconomic effect in this scope can be thought as a sum of all learner's long term impact in a certain time period. This kind of collective impact can be used to help decision making while planning the national core curriculum or budgeting and funding. The prediction of socioeconomic effect could be possible in similar way as in individual's impact prediction and also simulation would be possible in the same way.
Process Integration
Framework process integration is described above. The diagram shows how data concepts flow between processes.
Potential Applicant Interaction
CompLeap Tool Processes (väärässä kohtaa? voisiko olla vasta aivan lopussa mitä prototyypit sisältävät)
CompLeap tool processes are described above. The processes are part of learner's pathway and in defined in more detail to help implementation of prototypes. The process' details are described in following chapters.
Leaner creates Competence profile (module 1)
The Learner - generic user - starts to use CompLeap tools and creates My competence profile.
Learner Compare Education Opportunities (module 2)
Learner creates own Learner map (module 3)
Conceptual Data Model
The framework's conceptual data model is described above. Main concept is interoperable competence profile (ICP). The interoperable competence profile contains set of interoperable competences and contexts and it is refined by questions (and answers?). Interoperable competence is built from assessment results, work history, competences and badges. The context is build from interests and realities.
The information in ICP links to interesting education opportunities and open positions which are refined by guidance. Interesting education opportunities is realization of education offer which is realization of national core curriculum. Interesting open positions is realization of open positions.
The conceptual data model does not tell how the information is actually structured or modeled. From the framework perspective the concepts are recognized as something which is needed to make data flow smoothly among processes.(tuodaanko käsitteiden määritykset OKSAsta tähän?)
Analytics Dataflow
Data flow model in the Compleap project illustrates how data flows in the Compleap user services. Information about formal education, previous work history is gathered automatically from other systems and databases. Information about non formal and informal education as well as interests comes from the manual user (learner) input. Specific data set is extracted and used as a data combination to visualize competences for the user and at the same time stimulate his reflection on his current competence situation. User can also manually select data combination and filters to get a education recommendation. This is content based recommendation. 10 best results are presented to the user where he can further select his favorites and proceed to learners path visualization where information about education option is visualized for the user again to promote his understanding of the studying and also self-reflection. User is also able to give feedback about competence and learners path visualizations as well as education recommendations.
Layered Architecture views
Purpose of the models: Show processes, application services and information systems needed for providing CompLeap services.
Competence Mapping layered architecture view
Competence mapping layered architecture view is described above. The diagram describes the competence mapping service is implemented by competence mapping process. When learner uses the service the competence mapping process is executed. The learner gives information about her or himself and process outputs hers or his competences back to the learner.
In CompLeap context the whole competence mapping process is about to be digitalized by module 1 and the process of using digitalized tool is put inside the competence mapping process. In this case, User creates interoperable competence profile process implements the whole competence mapping process but in other implementations there can be manual stages also.
The blue ovals describe the application services supporting the competence mapping process. The application functions are implementations of application services and there could be many application functions which are categorized as same application service. In the diagram only the relevant in the context of the framework are shown.
The lowest row of boxes are systems to which the application functions are assigned in Finland. Thus, the system row is implementation specific.
Comparing opportunities layered architecture view
Career and study guidance layered architecture view
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Education offer layered architecture view
Application integration: Case Finland
CompLeap Competence profile system Application integration in case of Finland is described above. The system interacts with public authority systems via authentication proxy to meet GDPR requirements. Consent management is new aspect in system development and in Finland learner decides who can access her or his personal data. Interoperable profile management is done in collaboration with other profile related systems.