Vocational education and training - VET

Competency-based training (CBT) has been fundamental to how accredited VET is delivered in Australia for the last three decades or so and over this time it has garnered both advocates and critics. This research examines the strengths and weaknesses of CBT as it is currently applied to the Australian VET system and whether there is cause to consider a broader approach to defining and describing competence and hence considering how best teaching and learning in VET is delivered and assessed.

Competency-based education and training is at the heart of the Canadian system of colleges and institutes, and one of its greatest strengths. Over the last 40-years, these institutions have refined the Competency Based Approach (CBA), and many are now successfully applying it around the world. To help share that expertise, Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) is launching a comprehensive framework for implementing an approach to support competency-based education and training.

This extensive guide offers valuable lessons from Canadian colleges and institutes, while sharing best-practices, which will be especially useful for international counterparts looking to use the CBA to meet the needs of their own students. As such, this reference framework is designed as a tool to help educators adapt their own practices.

Canadian specialist residency training programs are implementing a form of competency-based medical education (CBME) that requires frequent assessments of entrustable professional activities (EPAs). Faculty struggle to provide helpful feedback and assign appropriate entrustment scores. CBME faculty development initiatives rarely incorporate teaching metrics. Dashboards could be used to visualize faculty assessment data to support faculty development.

Staff supporting the transition to competency-based online learning includes multidisciplinary expertise, such as instructional, multimedia and technological design, quality control, and language and other specialists and content experts, working with three particular focuses:

Instructional design: responsible for pedagogical design of content, assessments and learning activities.
Multimedia design: responsible for visual development, choice of technologies, choice of colours, etc. to ensure quality of the graphic and sound design.
Continuous improvement: responsible for maintenance of the inventory of 300 online courses, and the process of review, revision, and updating of courses as needed.

In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now it is about making sure that individuals develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world.

Background: Competency based medical education (CBME) relies on supervisor narrative comments contained within entrustable professional activities (EPA) for programmatic assessment, but the quality of these supervisor comments is unassessed. There is validity evidence supporting the QuAL (Quality of Assessment for Learning) score for rating the usefulness of short narrative comments in direct observation.

Objective: We sought to establish validity evidence for the QuAL score to rate the quality of supervisor narrative comments contained within an EPA by surveying the key end-users of EPA narrative comments: residents, academic advisors, and competence committee members.

Methods: In 2020, the authors randomly selected 52 de-identified narrative comments from two emergency medicine EPA databases using purposeful sampling. Six collaborators (two residents, two academic advisors, and two competence committee members) were recruited from each of four EM Residency Programs (Saskatchewan, McMaster, Ottawa, and Calgary) to rate these comments with a utility score and the QuAL score.  Correlation between utility and QuAL score were calculated using Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Sources of variance and reliability were calculated using a generalizability study.

Results: All collaborators (n = 24) completed the full study.  The QuAL score had a high positive correlation with the utility score amongst the residents (r = 0.80) and academic advisors (r = 0.75) and a moderately high correlation amongst competence committee members (r = 0.68).  The generalizability study found that the major source of variance was the comment indicating the tool performs well across raters.

Conclusion: The QuAL score may serve as an outcome measure for program evaluation of supervisors, and as a resource for faculty development.

The objective of this study is to refine and validate the aspects of Project-oriented Problem-based learning (PoPBL) and Competency-based education (CBE) in the instructional video conceptual model for Technical and Vocational Education (TVE). The researcher conducted a survey study, distributing questionnaires to 39 vocational institutions across peninsular Malaysia and Sabah, to determine the compatibility of PoPBL and CBE integration in the learning video. There are 500 respondents provided feedback. To test construct accuracy and item weakness or bias based on the data obtained, researchers used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with AMOS 20.0 software to confirm the components based on the constructs obtained. The results indicate there are significant relationship influenced by the elements of learning content, delivery of instruction, video design and video quality. This conceptual model's four elements are critical requirements in the setting of Technical and Vocational Education (TVE) and competency-based education. The findings of this study could be utilised to guide the design of instructional videos, particularly in the TVE, as well as a tool for evaluating current instructional videos.

India is implementing a New Education Policy (NEP), which aims to better serve the next generation of students by moving towards a competency-based curriculum that builds both knowledge and skills. As part of this plan, creativity and critical thinking will be explicitly taught as learnable skills.