=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1844/10000257
|storemode=property
|title=Competence Approach to Modeling and Control of Students’ Learning
Pathways in the Cloud Service
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1844/10000257.pdf
|volume=Vol-1844
|authors=Vitaliy Pavlenko,Aleksander Prokhorov,Olena Kuzminska,Mariia Mazorchuk
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icteri/PavlenkoPKM17
}}
==Competence Approach to Modeling and Control of Students’ Learning
Pathways in the Cloud Service==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1844/10000257.pdf
Competence Approach to Modeling and Control of
Students’ Learning Pathways in the Cloud Service
Vitaliy Pavlenko1, Aleksander Prokhorov1, Olena Kuzminska2,
Mariia Mazorchuk1
1 National Aerospace University "KhaI", 17, Chkalova St., Kharkiv, Ukraine
pavlenko_vitalii@ukr.net, al_val@mail.ru, mazorchuk.mary@gmail.com,
2 National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, 16a, Heroev Oborony
St., Kyiv, Ukraine
o.kuzminska@nubip.edu.ua
Abstract. The paper deals with the advantages of competence management in
the implementation of the universities’ development strategy. The competence
approach has been used to model and control students’ learning pathways by
means of cloud service. The authors offer a model of university competence man-
agement, showing the interrelations between its components. The study of the
university competences enabled the authors to describe the fragments of business
models within the educational process management frameworks. The paper ex-
plains how to model and control students’ learning pathways using cloud tools
and technologies. For the purpose of this research the cloud service has been cre-
ated in the Erlang OTP framework deployed in AWS EC2.
Key Words. Competence Management, Core Competence, Business Process
Management, Learning Pathway, Cloud Service
Key Terms. Educational Process, Project Management, Business Process Model
and Notation, Business Process Execution Language, Knowledge Management
1 Introduction
The features of University of the Future are the use of new technologies, the creation
of a virtual educational space and the ability to sell its services on the market. Cloud
technologies are one of the leading trends in today’s IT world. They will bring both the
university educational processes and business management system to a new quality
level. Today more and more educational processes become adapted to cloud environ-
ment that provides lower cost of investment and workflow organization [1, 2].
Presently, the most popular cloud services are electronic document management soft-
ware and data storage [3]. Electronic workflow that uses a single cloud platform be-
comes a major constituent of effective university management all over the world, espe-
cially in in view of the fact that numerous training centers are located in different coun-
tries and on different continents.
Today, a learning pathway becomes the main concept of educational process. The
learning pathway is described as the route, taken by an individual learner through a
range of e-learning activities. It allows learners to accumulate their knowledge progres-
sively. With learning pathways, the control of choice moves away from the tutor to the
learner [4, 5]. The learning process management performed via the control of learning
paths is a complex task that requires creation of a uniform information environment. In
addition, there is a large amount of structured information that is collected, processed
and exchanged by the university information systems e.g. accounting and ranking of
students and employees, curricula and syllabi, timetables, electronic grade books.
The concept of Business Process Management (BPM) for the university [6] requires
consideration of the business processes running within its main framework, namely,
management of educational and research processes, financial and administrative activ-
ities that come as special resources, continuously adapted to regular changes in accord-
ance with modern standards of professional education and labor market requirements.
Thus, data, applications and people become integrated through unified business pro-
cesses. To illustrate, Charles Sturt University has made an attempt to form the Higher
Education Process Reference Model that defines the core and support processes for the
university [7, 8]. The core processes fall within Discipline Profile, Learning and Teach-
ing, Research and Graduate Training. The support processes include Planning, Govern-
ance and Enabling processes. However, it should be noted that Business Process Model
and Notation (BPMN) has not been used for modeling the above processes. That is why
it is still not clear how a comprehensive BPM has been designed and deployed using,
for example, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).
In addition, it is necessary to comprehend in theory and practice how professionally
competent university teachers can contribute to marketable competences and skills of
alumnae and unique core competences of the university itself [9, 10]. The University
Core Competence is a leading competence governing the creation of a competitive ed-
ucational product as a result of a unique research and educational activities. The Core
Competence is a collective property of the teaching staff through which other compe-
tences and abilities (business processes) are organized and controlled, thus providing a
synergetic effect, i.e. their systemic interaction.
Thus, the purpose of the present research is work out a concept of modelling and
implementing the learning pathways for the university students. The learning pathways
are based on the competence approach and come as business processes deployed and
effectively controlled through the cloud service.
2 Competence Management in Strategic Development of
University
One of the main tasks is to adapt the competence model to educational standards
and business requirements, which is pre-conditioned by continuous improvement of
both available business processes (Business Process Management, BPM) and develop-
ment and implementation of innovative projects based on project management tools
(Project Management, PM ).
At that, the ongoing university business processes shape the job requirements,
which in turn underlie the competence management. The analysis of strategically im-
portant business processes allows us to focus on the relevant core competences of the
university. As for the BPM, the knowledge of a business process is a minimal and suf-
ficient data-set required for the trained professionals to run this business process [11].
Knowledge Management (KM) is a basic component of the competence management
framework within the university [12]. KM provides the conditions for identification,
storage and effective use of knowledge and information within the university and its
environment, including the competence of the university and its staff. The staff compe-
tences are described as a set of requirements to their knowledge, skills and qualities for
a particular function, position or role in an innovative project (the latter may be part of
new developments, start-up, new forms of interaction with companies etc.).
The knowledge management strategy is aimed to provide the departments and spe-
cialists of the university with the necessary knowledge on timely basis, if they need it
to improve the efficiency of the university. This is done through the use of competence
repository as the central link of the entire system. The repository will allow the staff to
independently supervise, adapt and develop their individual competences, whereas the
university will be able to control its own set of organizational competences. The uni-
versity will enjoy the opportunity to smooth out the bottlenecks or gaps in the required
competences by transferring some of the knowledge and skills from major specialists
to other promising staff either through training or competence transfer mechanism.
The competence management is part and parcel of Learning Management System.
Continuous learning is one of the core competences necessary for a university to de-
velop in modern market. The competence management model is shown in Fig.1.
As a result of research, the developed concept lets us to present the process of com-
petence management as a sequence of stages such as assessment, identification and
description of competences necessary for successful strategic development of the uni-
versity; definition of goals for the university development strategy based on internal
and external competences; translation of the goals set into the Key Performance Indi-
cators (KPI) that show if the strategic goals of the university have been achieved based
on core competences; assessment and formation of competence profiles for various spe-
cialists; development of competence models according to the trends and objectives of
the university development; comparison of specialists’ profiles with the competence
requirements of innovative projects; identification of the so-called gaps; curriculum
planning and staff training or, if necessary, new staff employment according to the de-
veloped model and competence profiles; management, development and transfer of
competences during the implementation of innovative projects.
Business
Strategic analysis and management Project
Process
Management
Management
Primary activity Development projects
KPI
Analysis of
Evaluation the
Identifying the competitive Defining sources of implementati
strategies of university competitive advantage on of
projects
KPI Assessment of strategic potential
Identification Profiles of
competences
Identification of key Possibility of change of
core competencies
competencies of the university (for innovative projects)
Planning and control
Formation of the strategic objectives of the university
development on the basis of core competencies
Indicators of goals Control of
Business achievement implementation Roles Tasks
requirements
and educational KPI
standards Strategic map
The need for
Efficiency Competitiveness projects in the
Generation of competencies
competency Repository
models
Knowledge Checking
Checking validity Knowledge validity of
of competency Skills
competency
models Skills models
Personal qualities
Abilities
Motivation
Generation of
Knowledge Technologies Potential
competency
Management Base of the university Base personal competencies models
competencies of staff and students
Evaluation
Evaluation of competencies of teaching staff and
Evaluation Professional students Role
of the
teaching staff
KPI Profiles of competences of teaching staff and students
Learning
Determination of gap Management
The current level of
competence of teaching
Сompeten The required level of System
staff and students ces gap competence
Development and Transfer
Transfer of Program of competence development
competences
Learning and Improving the system of Attracting staff with the
development programs interaction of departments required competences
Training
The organization of Create groups of Common programs
(communication, personal effectiveness,
training for university staff initiatives training, certification, etc.)
Fig. 1. Model of competence management at the university (Source: Own work)
Thus, core competences that come as resources and abilities are only potentially
leading the university to success. They will only become efficient in a competitive
struggle of the university, if transformed and embodied in the final educational product
with a due account of parameters that are crucial for the market. To illustrate, the rapid
development of IT has already greatly affected the staff of universities that train IT-
professionals.
The strategic plan for the university development rests on the principle of reverse
logic: firstly, candidates with core and major competences are found; secondly, the
abilities (business processes) and the resources they manage are identified, and lastly,
efforts are focused on further development of these two and other relevant constituents.
3 Modeling and Control of Students’ Learning Pathways:
System Vision
Taking into account the competence approach, our task is to monitor and control
the learning pathways of university students more effectively. For this purpose, the
learning pathways are modeled and set up as business processes within a public service.
National aerospace university “KhAI” has launched a project on modeling and au-
tomated execution of business processes within the management framework of the uni-
versity educational process. The purpose is to monitor and control how successfully the
BPM participants - teachers, other staff and students – perform their duties according
to the project. Of particular significance are formalized learning pathways i.e. a se-
quence disciplines to be studied by the students, taking into account cloud-based com-
petence approach in the format of BPMN.
The student’s learning pathway has a starting point (admission to the university),
the main path (academic activity) leading a student to the final point - defense of the
graduate thesis. Thus, a university is provided with a uniform information environment,
where students, teachers and senior staff can communicate easily. This enables individ-
ual planning, monitoring and management of learning pathways for the students. The
participants in the process will automatically receive notifications and tasks sent to their
own devices - laptops, tablets and smartphones.
4 Business Process Models for Educational Process
Management Frameworks
After analyzing the educational processes within the university functional frame-
works, we have built BPMN models to describe each automatic process running on a
daily and weekly basis. To illustrate, a fragment of BPMN shows weekly processes
(Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. A fragment of BPMN showing weekly processes (Source: Own work)
According to the diagram, the process contains several pathways, two of which simu-
late the staff (teachers and students) activities, one reflects the control process itself,
and another one serves for sending e-mails and SMS, whereby the rest make up the
Application Program Interface (API) of the university information systems. Thus, the
logic of business processes is visualized, stored and performed in the cloud. In this way
one can track the process execution phase, receive the task statuses in real time, analyze
the data in course of the process execution, automatically generate and view summary
reports of any profile, and receive the information about the bottlenecks of the process
for taking appropriate corrective measures. This approach makes the process highly
adaptable and provides an opportunity to make changes on-the-fly i.e. it is sufficient to
make changes to the graphic model and restart the process, as the participants will re-
ceive tasks in accordance with the new process flowchart.
5 Cloud Service Tools and Technologies for Business Process
Management
The cloud services intended for business process management in various institutions
include IBM BlueWorks Live, AWS SWF, Appian, BPM Online Education, Corezoid,
PNMsoft Cloud, and Oracle Process Cloud Service. The results of their comparison are
shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Comparison of cloud services for business process management
Service Price Trial BPMN Education
version support Process
Management
Corezoid $50 per 50,000,000 pro- + - -
cess executions
AWS SWF $0.0001 per one process + - -
execution
IBM Blueworks Live $21 per month + + -
Appian a minimum of $225 + + -
BPM Online Educa- a minimum of € 200 - - +
tion
PNMsoft Cloud depends on the number + - -
of users and processes
Oracle Process Cloud $1,200 + + -
Service
Virtually all services have trial versions. The only service exclusively designed to
manage learning processes is BPM Online Education, whereas IBM Blueworks Live,
Appian and Oracle Process Cloud Service allow modeling of processes in BPMN. At
our university we plan to use AWS SWF because its price is reasonable and it can
perform all the basic required functions.
The architecture of the system for modeling and control of students’ learning path-
ways in the cloud services is shown in Fig. 3. It includes three main elements such as a
cloud service where processes are executed, a web application that is intended to design
services, and the university API with its information systems. The web application is
created in the MeteorJS framework, which allows one to develop both front-end and
back-end interfaces using the same logic for each. The bpmn.js library is used to work
with BPMN diagrams. The library helps to create a module designed to transform the
descriptive BPMN model into a scenario of its execution based on Business Process
Execution Language (BPEL).
Fig. 3. The architecture of the system for modeling and control of students’ learning pathways
in the cloud services (Source: Own work)
6 Results
The cloud-based system of educational process management has been only recently
introduced and therefore the overall deliverables are expected in the nearest future.
Presently, the KhAI is trying to combine separate educational frameworks within a sin-
gle platform connected to the cloud web service. The ability to control each running
education process has shown positive results. Thus, the time required for curriculum
planning, academic ranking, and teacher workload balancing has decreased by about
25%. The time is mainly spent only on entering and updating the information. This
contributes to minimization of all the computing and control procedures of the educa-
tional process. The long-time exploitation of the cloud-based system of educational
process management and additional research will enable the estimation of its efficiency.
7 Conclusion
The introduction of core competences in the system of strategic university manage-
ment helps the university to increase its competitiveness, achieve positive synergetic
results in implementing innovation projects, and adapt to new economic conditions.
The expected benefits of the approach offered consist in formalization and harmoniza-
tion of business processes (educational process, research and administrative activities);
unification of business processes where data, applications and staff/students become
integrated; creation of a uniform information space; transfer to individual planning,
monitoring and control of every student’s learning pathway within the university etc..
This allows the university to run transparent business processes and detect the condi-
tions that can be easily monitored, analyzed and optimized. As a result, the educational
process becomes easy, entertaining and advanced.
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