My friend's misadventure with the semiconductor company took place a while ago, which only indicates to me that this is a problem that's been around for quite some time. Naturally, he ended up taking a very different career path, and though he was very fortunate in how his life progressed, others have been just as unfortunate in what came after such an experience. Not everyone is as lucky as everyone else, and we have a responsibility to think about them.
Someone has been ... in fact, a lot of people have been, and as a result, two key concepts have taken on a very deep significance in European education policy: learning outcomes and accreditation of prior learning (which I'll call APL for short; it goes under a variety of names, but this one is as easy as any to recognize).
The traditional approach to education has been, whether you were aware of it or not, input-driven, and content-centered. We all went to school to learn those things that someone somewhere at some time decided were necessary for us to learn. Nobody ever asked any of us if we wanted to take physics or college algebra or world lit. We did it because it was on the schedule. End of story. That sums up, by the way, the education of 99% of all the people who have ever gone to school even a day in their lives.
Whether justified or not, the EU educational-policy people took industry seriously and said to themselves, "Well, if that's what the prospective employee is supposed to look like in the end, then let's focus on the outcomes and redesign our curriculum and training programs to ensure that this is what comes out in the end." They turned the whole process around and started working from the outcomes, back to what a learner would have to know, do and how well in order to perform as expected. It all seemed so innocent in the beginning, for the simple reason that it makes so much sense.
Believe me, this has kept training people and educators busy for years. When you think how old most of our school systems are and how long they have been input-oriented, well, you can easily imagine how hard it is to break hundred-years' old habits. Only now (and I've been involved in this for over a decade) are we starting to see some headway. It's not easy, believe me. In fact, try this little exercise to get an idea of what we are dealing with:
Think about the job you do: what would one have to learn/study to do your job? what knowledge (general and specific) is required? which skills are essential? which competences are required? And, once you have that sorted out in your mind, imagine what it would mean to document that so that anyone anywhere, if s/he followed that program of learning/training would be able to replace you. Right. It's not an easy task, but that's what an outcome-oriented approach attempts to do.
Next time, we'll take this a step further.
No comments:
Post a Comment