Abstract:

In engineering education there are increased needs for life-long-learning and individual qualification planning. Student mobility is on the rise, and there is pressure to implement more efficient methods in teaching and educational quality management. Innovative solutions for a more transparent representation of qualifications, therefore, will play a key role in achieving the necessary changes. In the education market learning outcomes (LO) give an explicit value to a currency, which is, in this case, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and the European Credit Point System for Vocational Training (ECVET). Until now the utilization of standardized LO has not achieved acceptance in the European Higher Education (HE) Market. There are certain issues which might be causing resistance. Some might not consider instructional activities as products with comparable features. Some might not know how to apply LO. Many are struggling with the complexity and diversity of information that arises when LO from various courses are created and brought together. A further analysis and evaluation of accreditations or curriculum planning is especially laborious.
If LO are regarded as threshold standards of the students’ ability to perform a particular task at the end of a formal learning activity, then they can be seen as a binding product feature. A LO representation, which is based on a shared concept, facilitates reliable comparisons of teaching activities within the market for higher and further education.
Higher Education Management Systems can process data and support all processes in a study program. They provide teaching contents, learning processes and performance levels expressed in course descriptions and qualification frameworks on the web. This enables all stakeholders in the educational market to analyze information about instructional activities and plan them more efficiently.
This paper describes the creation of a higher education management system. Emphasis lies on a software-tool that generates outcome-oriented course descriptions and automatically annotates the descriptions. It assists the teacher in creating LO, which are both didactically adequate as well as readable by humans and machines. The use of the course description generator and the creation of a data base are shown in the example of the International Masters Program “Global Production Engineering” (GPE) at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.

Keywords:

Learning Outcomes, Campus Management Systems.