The BA Outdoor Education in the Community was, when established at Jordanhill in 1989, one of the first higher education courses in this subject in the UK. Recent research (unpublished) by the author, has found that there has been significant growth in this area with approximately 100 new higher education courses coming on stream in the last five to ten years. This has presented the outdoor education field with a significant problem in that the industry as a whole relies on National Governing Body awards (NGBs) in specific sports as a benchmark of practitioner competence. This is even more the case since the Activity Centres (Young Persons' Safety) Act of 1996 established regulations requiring evidence of qualification and safe practice. Degree level qualifications are often, therefore, not seen as a prime necessity but as a useful optional extra.Given issues such as this, and the practical nature of outdoor education, it is evident that higher education courses in outdoor education are struggling under conflicting constraints when it comes to matching the requirements of the outdoor industry with its need for NGBs and the academic requirements of higher-level studies. Furthermore, with outdoor education being a relatively new academic field, no academic, or QAA, benchmarks have as yet been identified. This has led to a proliferation of courses with dramatically different contents, learning objectives and outcomes. Most notably there is little agreement with regard to the amount of practical content that such a course should contain (Barnes, 2002). It is posited that this situation is typical of many of the new 'vocationally oriented' degrees that have appeared in the last few years.The aim of the research discussed in this paper is to establish a set of suggested learning outcomes for an outdoor education degree, or to rephrase the aim, to answer the question - what is an outdoor education degree? It is intended that the research will be able to propose such a set of learning outcomes to the Institute for Outdoor Learning, the professional body for outdoor education, to serve as guidelines for 'acceptable' degrees. This would follow the pattern established by the Construction Industry Council approval scheme, which has established common learning outcomes for degrees in its area (Watson, 2002) and 'kite mark' standards used in other vocational higher education courses, such as counselling. This paper asks fundamental questions such as 'is it possible to teach vocational skills through a higher education medium?' and 'is it acceptable to assess practical skills in an academic context?'. Questions such as these and the whole issue of vocationally oriented learning outcomes are, it is suggested, central to a new style of higher education course becoming ever more relevant to the changing requirements of a modern European society.