Valuing Prior Learning: Designing an ICT Artifact to Assess Professional Competences Through Text Mining

Purpose: This paper introduces an ICT artifact that uses text mining to support the
innovative and standardized assessment of professional competences within the
validation of prior learning. By assessing, we mean comparing identified and
documented professional competences against a standard or reference point. We
evaluate the designed artifact by matching a set of curriculum vitae (CV) scraped from LinkedIn against a comprehensive model of professional competence.

Design/Methodology/Approach: A design science approach informed the
development and evaluation of the ICT artifact presented in this paper.

Findings: A proof of concept shows that the ICT artifact can support assessors within the validation of prior learning procedure. Rather the output of such an ICT artifact can be used to structure documentation in the validation process.

Research limitations/implications: Evaluating the artifact shows that ICT support
to assess documented learning outcomes is a promising endeavor but remains a
challenge. Further research should work on standardized ways to document professional competences, ICT artifacts that capture the semantic content of documents, and refine ontologies of theoretical models of professional competences.

Practical implications: Text mining methods to assess professional competences rely on large bodies of textual data - thus a thoroughly built and large portfolio is necessary as input for this ICT artifact.

Originality/value: Following the recent call of European policy makers to develop
standardized and ICT-based approaches for the assessment of professional competences, we designed and evaluated an ICT artifact that supports the automatized assessment of professional competences within the validation of prior learning.

Keywords: professional competences; text mining; proof of concept; validation of
prior learning; assessment, design science