A Digital4Sustainability based Moodle Competence Framework

Open Risk

The complexity challenge

A key challenge facing the sustainability transition is the social and economic complexity of modern society. After centuries of cumulative technological development, the economy is exceedingly complex with countless sectoral specializations, supply chains and interdependencies. Efforts and initiatives towards more sustainable economies hit a complexity wall, which manifests as the lack of information and competences to make confident decisions. The result can be procrastination, push-back or unintended consequences.

Finding effective mechanisms to collectively handle this complexity challenge is important, as reaching a sustainable economy is not optional. Luckily, meeting the complexity challenge does depend to a material degree on the availability and ability to process information. As ours is also an era of rapidly and profoundly developing digital information technologies, these can, under conditions, become essential tools for coping with information complexity.

Open source digital technology catalysts

Digital technology is not uniquely defined, and is certainly not an unconditional panacea. It can easily create more problems than it solves, as can be seen in the generation of society-wide digital addictions, the spread of misinformation, the creation of new security vulnerabilities and the exponential growth of data center build-outs – with their own growing environmental footprints. The difference is that, especially on the software side, digital technology is extremely versatile.

It is ultimately up to societal contracts, business models and regulations to collectively shape, develop and use software that is fit-for-purpose for the sustainability transition. One powerful new modality that is by now firmly established and is already reshaping digital technology sectors is the widespread use of open source approaches. With the free sharing and (optionally) co-development of software, information technologies spread faster and wider. This is a catalyst we can and should leverage to manage the information complexity of the sustainability transition.

The role open source eLearning platforms

eLearning is by now a well established educational channel, with known advantages and limitations. It exemplifies precisely the transformative potential of digital technologies. Here too, open source has had a significant impact, with the Moodle eLearning platform (LMS) being one of the most successful open source projects, that continues going strong after several decades of development. Developing and sharing educational resources has never been easier, but how can we leverage this towards twin transition objectives?

As part of the Open Risk effort we have been building-out the Open Risk Academy as an eLearning platform to support the use of open source software tools, whether those are developed by Open Risk or others. The Academy is based on the Moodle LMS. Upon Open Risk joining the Digital4Sustainability Alliance community the idea of integrating D4S resources into the Academy was an immediate logical step.

A D4S competence framework for Moodle

The D4S consortium is developing and implementing comprehensive training programmes at the intersection of digital technology and sustainability. The resources developed by the D4S consortium, such as educational profiles and comprehensive competence frameworks provide a well researched and structured context. Developing a technical tool to support D4S aligned competence frameworks within Moodle/the Academy provides the link and overall canvas on which to place individual educational resources. For example helping to place within the overall taxonomy the educational resources supporting our own software tools around sustainable portfolio management and reporting.

Conveniently Moodle supports the use of custom competence frameworks in various eLearning contexts. As the D4S output envisages holistic educational programmes, covering diverse labor market needs, our task was to extract a hierarchy of digital sustainability competences that captures the structure of the D4S logic, but fits the simpler classification framework supported by Moodle and the Academy.

A D4S competence ontology as organizing framework

A future-proof methodology (in line with using technology to fight complexity!) is to develop first a semantic ontology based on the D4S specifications. Ontologies and related reasoning tools belong to an earlier generation of so-called “AI” technologies, though today that category is overshadowed (but not replaced) by rapidly evolving LLM capabilities.

An OWL ontology is at its simplest manifestation a logically structured spreadsheet (e.g., it can be expressed as an XML file, just like a spreadsheet is itself an xlsx file), where all entries (concepts and relations between concepts) are properly annotated using standardized conventions. This representation allows interoperability, composition, programmatic processing, logical reasoning and other niceties when one works with complex interelations of concepts. For example, the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations taxonomy itself is published also as a guiding ESCO ontology.

The thought process and technical work around developing an ontology based on the D4S resources is described further in a technical blog post, where interested readers can dive into the details. In passing we should mention that it was important for this work that D4S releases related resources under a Creative Commons license, as this allows us to build on them with minimal friction. The result looks visually as per the snapshot below.

The nodes in the graph represent the concepts that make up the framework (e.g., a Competency) and the links represent relations between them (e.g. a Learning Outcome supports some Competency). One can also explore the ontology interactively.

From a competences ontology to a Moodle competence framework

Once the logic of the relevant D4S resources is encoded digitally, it is relatively easy to extract what is needed for a specific application. Moodle imports competence frameworks using a CSV file that is structured in a specific way. In constructing this information artifact we can apply the specificities of our eLearning platform.

For example, D4S does a detailed mapping of competences to the e-CF hierarchy. For our and other use cases the top-level hierarchy would be more functional if it identified practice domains (e.g., Data and Analytics, Policy and Compliance etc.) instead of a pure process based classification (Plan, Build, Run etc.). The thought process and result is discussed in more detail in a second dedicated technical blog post. When imported into Moodle, the D4S based competence framework looks as follows:

How can educators, training providers and learners use the Moodle D4S competency framework?

The standard use of a competence framework within an LMS is to set rules that automatically grant to learners credentials, upon the completion of associated learning activities. The mix and association of activities with competences is flexible. The framework is available to download under a Creative Commons license (scroll to the bottom of the blog post). Any Moodle administrator can import it and use it alongside any other frameworks they may use. Within the Moodle use community the framework has already been translated into German using machine translation and tested in other instances.

The current release is a first iteration and proof-of-concept. Any feedback by the D4S community on any aspects of this work is most welcome. We plan to further refine its application to sustainability topics that are the current focus of the Academy: sustainable finance and green public procurement.