A university provides foreign languages courses as Learning Opportunities:

• Icelandic as a second language;
• Dutch for foreigners

These two different learning opportunities will each get a different identifier.

A secondary vocational education institution provides professional courses as learning opportunities:

• professional course of kitchen/pastry technician
• professional course of restaurant/bar technician

These two different learning opportunities will each get a different identifier.

A university awards different qualifications in the engineering department:

• Bachelor of industrial sciences;
• Master of industrial sciences: Chemical engineering;
• Master of industrial sciences: Electronic engineering.

A Vocational Education and Training (VET) provider awards different VET qualifications in the field of ICT:

• Qualification of ICT worker;
• Qualification of ICT service worker;
• Qualification of ICT service desk manager.

In both cases, these three different qualifications will each get a different identifier.

The identifier must be globally unique. This means that there is no other identifier in the world that is the same.

The identifier must be persistent: it should not change when the concept itself changes (for example when it changes location, or when a Learning Opportunity changes its name). Once you assign an identifier, it should always refer to the same concept (whenever, even if the concept does not exist anymore). This is needed because other systems might still use the identifier to refer to the concept.

In the best case, the identifier is dereferenceable: this means that anyone who uses the identifier, can access the concept itself. However, this is not a requirement.

You can design identifiers however you like if they meet the requirements of being unique and persistent.

If your organisation uses a system to assign codes to concepts, such as a national code for each qualification, then you can start from these codes to build identifiers. If you, however, prefer to use the code as an identifier itself, you must foresee that the identifiers are persistent and globally unique.

The best practice is to use URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) as identifiers. Uniqueness and persistence are guaranteed by the strategy of URIs. But it is possible to use identifiers other than URIs. In that case, you might have to foresee a way to build in uniqueness and persistence yourself.

Both options are explained with examples below.

The ELM consists of classes and properties, divided into three kinds:

• Required data fields: fields that you ''must'' publish in any case;
• Recommended fields: fields that you should publish in case they are available;
• Optional data fields: fields that you can choose to publish, to give more information on the qualification or learning opportunity.

The tables below provides only the required data fields for each type of data (Learning Opportunities, Qualifications and Accreditations) with the information on:

• Label: referring to the property name (first column) ;
• Cardinality: indication of possible occurrences of given element (0.. meaning optional, 1.. compulsory and ..1 meaning maximum 1 value while ..* meaning potentially multiple values);
• Description: contains the definition of the property.

The learning opportunities required and recommended data fields are provided i below. For all the data fields, please refer to the QDR Document Library.

A learning opportunity is any course, education or training available to an individual, taking the form of onsite, online or blended learning, in a formal or non-formal context. The opportunity is provided at a given time usually with the aim to obtain a certain learning award, such as a qualification. A learning opportunity can, but does not necessarily have to, be linked to a qualification.

          Example: I attend a two-year VET course which leads to a qualification of dental assistant. In parallel, I attend a five-hour PPT crash course organised by the national employment service, which leads to a certificate of attendance. Both are learning opportunities.

Learning Achievement Specification

A description of a set of knowledge and/or skills used with responsibility and autonomy, which may be acquired. For further information about specifications, please refer to the introduction to the ELM. 

The Qualification required and recommended data fields are provided in the table below. The list of the elements for data fields for the electronic publication of information on qualifications with an EQF level is gathered in the Annex VI of the EQF Council Recommendation previously mentioned.

A specification of an assessment and validation process which is obtained when a competent authority determines that an individual has achieved learning outcomes to given standards. A Qualification is a subclass of the Learning Achievement Specification.

Since 2004, learning outcomes as a principle have been systemically promoted in the EU policy agenda for education, training and employment. The 2017 EQF Recommendation defines learning outcomes as ‘…statements of what an individual should know, understand and/or be able to do at the end of a learning process, which are defined in terms of knowledge, skills and responsibility and autonomy.’ This same definition has been integrated within the European Learning Model. 

In line with this approach, learning outcomes are a mandatory field when publishing information on qualifications and learning opportunities in accordance with the European Learning Model, helping to bind together the different European tools developed in the last decade. 

In June 2024 Cedefop and the European commission published the European guidelines for the development and writing of short, learning-outcomes-based descriptions of qualifications developed in the EQF-Europass project group (from here on the guidelines). The publication offers recommendations on the formal aspects (length, format) and content (scope, complexity, context) of these descriptions. It also includes practical resources, such as lists of action verbs and qualifiers, to help describe clearly the learning outcomes of qualifications.

We invite any entity that is publishing or considering to publish data to the QDR to familiarise themselves with the guidelines to learn to draft and structure learning outcomes that are published via the QDR. 

The provision of learning outcomes data is crucial for the quality of data provided, helping to improve the understanding and portability of qualifications. Short, specific learning outcomes can help individuals showcase the value of their qualifications in their job application or requests for recognition. 

When publishing to the QDR, the use of either the ‘learning outcome’ and/or the ‘learning outcome summary’ field is mandatory. To publish your learning outcomes in accordance with guidelines, you will need to use both, where: 

• The narrative presenting the overall objectives and orientation of the qualification corresponds to the ‘Learning Outcome Summary’ field (elm:learningOutcomeSummary) in ELM.
• Each individual bullet point expressing learning outcomes is referenced using the ‘Learning Outcome’ field (elm:LearningOutcome)

Illustration of the ELM fields corresponding to the short descriptions of Learning Outcomes

By using these fields, the short descriptions of learning outcomes will be correctly visualised in Europass. 

Data publishers can also choose to supply additional information for each individual learning outcome (corresponding to the bullet points in the guidelines), as well as related ESCO skills. This allows for the provision of richer data and aid the course and qualification recommender system in Europass. 

For further information on how to structure the data, we invite you to refer to the LOQ schemata files available here.

The Accreditation required and recommended data fields are provided in the table below. For all the data fields, please refer to the Schema files published here. 

In some cases, you may be able to fit such information into “AdditionalNote”, if this is not possible it is better to omit to publish it. In case you believe the information is important and not represented in the schemata, you can suggest additional data fields for future improvement.

This is not a problem. It is allowed to use only a subset of the classes (and properties) of the LOQ schema. While every class has mandatory properties in the LOQ Application Profile, you do not need to inform all classes in your learning opportunity  / qualification data. Every Learning Opportunity must be specified by either a Learning Achievement Specification or a Qualification (that is a special kind of Learning Achievement Specification); if your learning opportunity is not specified by a Qualification, you do not need to supply QF values even though the EQF and NQF levels are mandatory properties of the Qualification class.

The European Commission is aware that additional mandatory fields can restrict countries from publishing and this delays the publication process. However, additional required fields also enrich the data and work as an incentive to gather the data from the data providers at national level.

If the data for a mandatory field is not yet available, the European Commission is open to discuss together with the data-provider the possibilities for a temporary workaround. The goal is to avoid that countries cannot publish because they are unable to provide the mandatory fields data. This should be under the condition that the workaround is temporary, and work will be done to commit to the mandatory fields to best serve the Europass end-users.

The language is apparent in some of the properties of a concept, for example, the title of qualification / learning opportunity or its homepage.  

Example 1 (qualifications): In the Netherlands, the official title of a bachelor’s in chemistry is ‘B Chemie’ (CROHO code 34396). In English, the official title is ‘B Chemistry’. But an awarding body can refer to it as ‘Bachelor in de Chemie', which is an alternative Dutch title. This would be modelled as such:

Example 2 (learning opportunities): In the Netherlands, the official title of an opportunity is ‘NL English’. In English, the official title is ‘EN English’. But an awarding body can refer to it as ‘English taught in Dutch’, which can server as alternative English additional note. This would be modelled as such: