The meeting provided an excellent opportunity to have an overview of curriculum description practices. Five representatives of ministries of education explained the way their curriculum is structured for different areas. A first analysis shows that the approaches are quite diverse not only between national curricula but also between topics within a single national curriculum. The challenge will be to find common dimensions used in curricula, to determine a system of concepts that expresses these dimensions, and to find ways to map these dimensions to learning resource characteristics.

The main curriculum characteristics currently used are topic, goal/competency, and learning activity. It is interesting to see that in recent years there is a trend to define a curriculum more in terms of desirable competencies than purely in terms of knowledge to be acquired.

The first analysis also showed that curricula are defined at different levels including the national level, the regional level, the local authority level, the school level, and the classroom level. Countries have a different practice concerning the level is addresses, the depth, and the curriculum content providers. For example in one country the curriculum is defined in broad terms and it is the publishers of educational material that refine it. When such detailed curricula are then approved by the ministry, the school has the option to choose which curriculum to follow. Another country would allow a lot to be defined at the classroom level.

On the second day the workshop focused on the technical implementation options. Given the multicultural and multilingual diversity, it will be necessary to find a common ground for each of the dimensions of a curriculum (topic, goal/competency, and activity) and to relate the national curricula to a common spine. For the topic dimension, the multi-lingual thesaurus of the European Schoolnet can be used. This thesaurus contains about 1,200 terms in 14 languages related to education in schools.

The workshop also discussed the role of the curriculum as a guide for personal learning. As curricula are more and more defined in terms of competencies to be acquired there is an obvious relationship with what is in a student’s e-portfolio. While these aspects are outside the scope of the CALIBRATE project, a better understanding of curriculum characteristics will indeed positively influence the work on personalised learning.

The full analysis of how descriptions of national curricula and curricula mapping approaches that can improve the interoperability between systems in the discovery, evaluation and use of learning resources is expected in the third quarter of 2006.