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heavily used at the UOC virtual campus. Neverthe-
less, although there are several other definitions for
learning objects, all of them coincide in a single de-
sired behavior: reusability (Polsani, 2003).
Metadata for a learning object describes relevant
characteristics of such learning object to which ap-
plies, pursuing reusability. Regarding the LOM stan-
dard, such characteristics may be grouped in nine cat-
egories, namely: general, life cycle, meta-metadata,
educational, technical, educational, rights, relation,
annotation, and classification. For our purposes, the
“educational” and “classification” categories are the
possible targets for extending the LOM standard to in-
clude descriptors about competencies, instead of the
“annotation” category, which is mostly used for un-
structured descriptions. Finally, although it is not nec-
essary, it is also possible to add the appropriate data
to the “meta-metadata” category to identify the source
of the proposed extension.
4.2 Extending the LOM Standard
Following the directions given in the previous sec-
tions, Table 1 resumes the new elements added to
the LOM standard for describing a competency: an
optional textual description and a combination of
Bloom and Tuning descriptors. For each element,
its name, size (or cardinality) and its type or the
set of possible values are shown. The level (depen-
dencies) of the new element is also shown, in or-
der to clarify whether an element is present or not
depending on the value of its root element. For
example, both the TuningSpecificLevel and
TuningSpecificDescription elements have
only sense if a specific competency has been speci-
fied through the use of the TuningSpecificName
element, within another TuningSpecific one.
Notice that we have not included metadata for the
psychomotor competencies as described in Bloom
(Bloom, 1956), although its implementation is
straightforward following the same approach, in case
of other educational environment requirements. Cur-
rently now, we have also discarded to include a con-
fidence value as defined in (S
´
anchez-Alonso and Si-
cilia, 2005), because its usage is not clear and it might
generate doubts in the teachers adopting this proposal
for describing competencies. Regarding the taxon-
omy used for identifying the possible verbs describing
cognitive competencies, it can be found in (Bloom,
1956), but it could be extended if needed.
For describing the required competencies, that
is, the competencies that a student needs to per-
form a certain activity, they can be incorporated
into the proposal using the same approach, adding
a new level of description, one for required com-
petencies (“requires”) and other for developed
(“develops”). These competencies identify the
minimum requirements in competency terms of the
learning contents used to further develop other com-
petencies. Although required competencies are de-
fined by instructional designers and teachers, accord-
ing to their expertise, it is also possible to determine
some of them from the competencies described in Ta-
ble 1, using the appropriate set of rules defined in an
ontology about competencies. For example, as stated
in (Gonz
´
alez and Wagenaar, 2003), systemic compe-
tencies require as a base the prior acquisition of in-
strumental and interpersonal competencies.
Finally, for describing specific competencies di-
rectly related to narrow knowledge areas, it is better
to use available taxonomies when possible. For exam-
ple, for learning resources used in the Computer Sci-
ence degree, the 1998 extended ACM taxonomy
1
is
used (at the UOC) to describe the specific content cat-
egories, while the MeSH taxonomy
2
is widely used to
describe medical terms. UOC is currently redefining
the taxonomies for all the knowledge areas, in order
to establish a common language for describing all the
learning contents in the virtual campus.
4.3 The IMS-LD Standard
The IMS-LD (Learning Design) standard tries to de-
scribe the aspects more related to the learning process
in itself, such as sequencing or role playing, that is,
the second level of description as aforementioned. It
seems clear that this information cannot be stored in
the learning objects, but in a higher semantic level.
Although the IMS-LD standard may seem too com-
plex, its flexibility and multilevel description capa-
bilities allow the specification of any learning pro-
cess ranging from simple educational itineraries to
complex learning processes including personalization
and collaborative working capabilities. In IMS-LD,
“Learning-objectives” within an “Activity” is pre-
cisely the place to describe competencies, but using
a more textual approach. Each learning objective is
described using, at least, two basic fields, a text based
description and a type, which can be one (and only
one) of the following: skill, knowledge, insight, at-
titude, competency and other. Therefore, any exten-
sion to include a more comprehensive description of
competencies should be included here, using the pro-
posal presented in this paper. IMS-LD will proba-
bly become a standard for defining complex learn-
ing processes, including personalization issues, and
so. Therefore, it would be interesting to study how
to include our proposal in the IMS-LD standard tak-
ing also into account not only competencies but also
activities and roles.
1
http://www.acm.org/class
2
http://medline.cos.com/mesh/main.shtml
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