The current OSN Skills Collaboratives are in full swing, with groups across the world working to develop and implement RSDs. One collaborative, based in Australia, is taking on an enormous challenge: to translate skills from the Australian Skills Classification framework into RSDs. Creating these collections of RSDs that contain metadata aligning them to Australian educational data will allow for more fit-for-purpose utilization of skills across sectors.
The collaborative, titled “Spanning the Boundaries: Leveraging existing 21 Century RSD libraries to explore the implementation of RSDs for the Australian education and employment ecosystem”, is made up of three partners: ed-tech startup Edalex, the University of Melbourne, and OSN Spring Pilot participant Education Design Lab.
The opportunity this collaborative represents is a great one. Edalex is the developer of two platforms openEQUELLA and Credentialate These platforms serve as the connective tissue between content, assessment, learning outcomes data, industry-defined skills and more. With this data in hand, educators and employers alike can see the connection between skills and competencies, and translate that into their education, employment and job-training work. One of Edalex’s key goals is to curate existing RSDs, including the 21st Century Skills framework created by Education Design Lab, and import them into Credentialate.
Once RSDs are imported, Edalex aims to map these collections of RSDs to micro-credentials issued by the University of Melbourne. This collaboration will allow UniMelb to explore how such RSD-based microcredentials might apply in the continuing professional education space.
The hope is by demonstrating the value of skills-language at one of Australia’s distinguished universities, others in the Australian education system may follow suit. Because skills data has yet to be standardized in Australia, RSDs are a key opportunity to introduce such standardization across education sectors and employment systems. Such thinking can help learners and employers alike speak a common skills language, which can promote equity in access for all learners. Demonstrating the value of skills-language at one of Australia’s most prestigious universities may even encourage others in the Australian education system to follow suit.
At the conclusion of the collaborative work, Edalex hopes to provide a set of recommendations and an implementation path to help the Australian government and education institutions move toward an open, interoperable skills language. With this roadmap in hand, Edalex’s long-term goal is to expand both Credentialate’s and openEQUELLA’s functionality to ingest and publish open RSD libraries for Australia and other countries.
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