Towards a Learning Situation Application Profile Olivier Gerbé, Jacques Raynauld HEC Montréal 3000, Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine Montréal (Québec) Canada H3T 2A7 Tel: +1 514 340 6000 – Fax: +1 514 340 6411 – e-mail: olivier.gerbe@hec.ca , jacques.raynauld@hec.ca Martin Beaulieu Université de Montréal CP 6128 Succursale Centre-Ville Montréal (Québec) Canada H3C 3J7 Tel: +1 514 343 6111 – e-mail: m.beaulieu@umontreal.ca Abstract: The new education program proposed for Quebec focuses on the development of competencies. Knowledge and skills are organized in terms of competencies and learning processes. The three main components of the program - the broad areas of learning, the cross-curricular competencies and the subject- specific competencies - may be combined in different ways and offer a wide range of learning situations (LS). To increase accessibility, facilitate localization and, ultimately, the sharing and re-use of learning situations, this paper initiates a reflection and proposes a specific application profile that is compliant with recent work intended to standardize the description of learning objects. Key words: Knowledge management, Education, Competencies 1 INTRODUCTION Over the last few years, important efforts have been undertaken to define standards in order to solve problems of description, indexing and classification of pedagogical resources. The prodigious increase of pedagogical resources available on the Web has led to the development of standards such as the IEEE LOM [2] or application profiles such as CanCore [1] in Canada and Normetic [4] in the province of Quebec. The new Quebec education program gives four orientations that provide guidelines for the practical application of the program’s aims: • success for all, • education that focuses on the development of competencies, • evaluation that promotes learning, • integrated learning. Therefore, knowledge and skills are organized in terms of competencies and learning processes. The three main components of the program - the broad areas of learning, the cross-curricular competencies and the subject- specific competencies - may be combined in different ways and offer a wide range of learning situations. A learning situation (LS) is a complex set of activities that involve multiple competencies, concepts and skills. Although it exists a minimal uniformity in educational material that are compliant with the new education program, and although there exists evaluation criteria to be approved by the ministry, the available resources do not always present the same elements and are not always structured in the same manner. The document, provided by the approval office of educational material “Évaluation des aspects pédagogiques du matériel didactique, enseignement primaire et secondaire“ 1 [8], defines the criteria to evaluate the compliance of educational material with the development of the competencies. Nevertheless, during the analysis of existing learning situations, we observed that some of them introduce elements that are not well defined. This is the case for educational approaches, teaching strategies, means of evaluation, cultural indicators, exercises practice, necessary equipment, approximate length and class management. Often learning situations do not use the same vocabulary to describe similar things. For example, it is possible to find the three steps of the educational process (preparation, realization and integration) inside one of the activities of the LS or to find several activities inside a same step of the process. 1 Evaluation of the educational aspects of educational resource - elementary and secondary school education.