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CHALLENGES RESULTING FROM
THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
OF APL
Baartman, 2008). The question is how to com-
bine these quality requirements with the limited
resources, like persons and time, that are usually
available. After all, the development of reliable
and valid assessments is time-consuming and
expensive (Bélanger & Mount, 1998).
Table 1 summarizes the obstacles as they occur
in the various stages of the process of APL. The
table also describes the different instruments that
support a particular phase of the APL procedure.
As mentioned previously the research findings that
we presented in this section are mainly applicable
to APL procedures that are common in educational
settings in which employees consider attendance
of an educational track preceded by participating
in an APL procedure in order to determine size
and content of their study program. Reliable
research findings related to other applications of
APL procedures outside the educational domain
are, to our knowledge, until now not available.
APL readily becomes a time-consuming and hence
costly exercise. To avoid this, one had better re-use
APL procedures once they have been developed.
However, because of essential differences between
procedures, not all aspects are re-usable. To find
out which are and which are not, a further elabo-
ration of these aspects is needed.
If we require that developers of APL proce-
dures can exchange parts of these procedures in
electronic form, using whatever software and
hardware systems, Interoperability enters the
scene. It comes in two flavours, syntactic and
semantic interoperability. Syntactic interoper-
ability is the capability of two or more software
systems to exchange information and then act on
it. Semantic interoperability builds on syntactic
interoperability and guarantees that the infor-
mation exchanged is actually used the way it is
Table 1. Challenges and supportive instruments for successful APL procedures
Stage of the procedure
Clarification of challenge
Supportive instruments
Candidate-profiling phase
• Need of personalised advice is time consuming
• Competence profile
• Self-assessment instrument
• Personal Development Plan
• Website with APL information
• Interactive FAQ-lists
Evidence gathering phase
• Difficulties with collecting appropriate evidence.
• No check on portfolio
• Very diverse evidence
• The amount of evidence
• Misinterpretation of competences and standards
• Need for advice, clear examples and some kind of 'orga-
nizer'
• Support system for composing portfolio
• Portfolio template (with good and bad
examples)
• Electronic seeking and presenting of
analogous cases
• Competence profile
Assessing the portfolio
• Lack of clear and specified standards and rubrics
• Sometimes one in stead of two or more assessors
• Lack of training assessors
• Time constraints
• Appropriateness of assessment instruments
• Rubrics and scoring forms
• Interview protocol
• Criteria overview
• Database with jurisprudence on assess-
ment results
Validation phase
• Lack of clear instructions to report the outcomes
• Difficulties in describing competence levels
• No national/sectoral agreement on format
• APL certificate
• Dynamic overviews of recognisable
programme elements
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