Abstract:

Recent developments in workforce development, the volatile environment of graduate employability and the economic downturn of the past few years have led to the need of careful educational planning and curriculum design. The MUSKET (Middlesex University Skills and Education Planning Tools) project aims at supporting employer engagement and workforce planning requirements by providing a CRM based integrated view of employer based, professional and tertiary sector education. Funded by the JISC institutional innovation programme, the MUSKET project delivers models that will span employer engagement and course information in a unified and integrated manner. The project deliverables allow non-technical specialists to import MS Word documents containing course descriptions from professional providers, employer specific training and HE and provide semantic mark-up to enable exporting. The project also supports the defining of mappings and relationships between different sources and types of course information to support employer-led learner route planning.

This paper provides an overview of how the developed educational planning tools assist decision making in Accreditation of Prior Experiential and Certificated Learning (APEL/APCL). The paper provides a detailed discussion of how the APEL and APCL processes have been structured and supported for several years in the Institute of Work Based Learning. Furthermore the paper discusses how these processes are supported in aligning learning proposals to curriculum pathways. The paper proceeds with design and development issues of proof of concepts prototypes and concludes by evaluating the role of such educational planning tools with respect to quality assurance and accreditation standards.

Keywords:

institutional innovation, employer engagement, educational planning, curriculum design.