CRESDA: towards a personalized student advisory for professional development

Student participation in extracurricular activities has been proven to be as an important element in personal development and become an indicator of their competencies in relation to their future career success. However, participation in extracurricular activities is not systematically recorded and is difficult to be used for planning and reflection. Therefore, a repository was developed to record student participation in extracurricular activities. Activity organizers can define the attributes (codified competencies) based on the learning objectives, learning activities and expected learning outcomes; and can link these attributes to the corresponding extracurricular activity. We performed two case studies. One showed that different sets of competencies are needed by students in different disciplines, while the other demonstrated the correlation between extracurricular activities participation and academic performance within a discipline. Riding on these findings, we proposed an approach towards personalized student advisory on professional development.