To be or not to be..... the actor's role.

While we've been developing the various EKD models we've also been looking at the research basis for what we are trying to do. One interesting piece or research from the USA is about non-credit courses in US Community Colleges. The article explores the use of non-credit education as a bridging mechanism to allow students who have performed poorly in high school to enter community colleges. They argue that noncredit programs have many advantages including "lower cost; greater accessibility, flexibility, and responsiveness; and greater access to immigrants." They cite a number of cases where learners have moved from non-credit courses into success in the mainstream college. This fits well with one of the concepts in our model that knowledge is free but accreditation costs and that making the barriers to entry as low as possible can lead to greater engagement.

Today's task is to look at the Actors and Resource model. This is used to describe how different actors and resources are related to each other and how they are related to components of the Goals Model as well as to components of the Business Processes Model (BPM). For instance, an actor may be the responsible for a particular process in the BPM or, the actor may pursue a particular goal in the Goals Model. The Actors and Resources Model usually clarifies questions, such as: who is/should be performing which processes and tasks, how is the reporting and responsibility structure between actors defined?

I actually left the office at 5pm yesterday and took a 30 minute train ride out of Riga to Jurmala and had a very pleasant evening strolling along the longest beech I've ever seen by the surprisingly calm Baltic.