Description

This will be a technical work package that develops the institutional environment. This will be done to enable institutions to identify and support the informal learning activities of students/workers and it involves the creation of an interface that will allow institutional staff (tutors and HR managers) to access the information about their informal learning that the learners have made visible, the analysis of that information, the generation of analyses to facilitate dialogue with learners and decision-making.

This work-package will consist in two main elements, an institutional environment and a competence catalogue. The environment will integrate tools for data analysis and decision-making, based on visual analytics techniques that have been developed and tested by the leader of this package. The competence catalogue will provide a set of common competences that will be used during the tagging process (WP3) and can be extended, adapted or enriched by institutions and learners. The institutional environment will provide access to the information about informal learning activity, and the associated competences, that the learners have made visible. This information will be analysed by the staff at the institution and, depending on the aim of the analysis (for example, improvements to personal learning pathways, promotion, evaluation of personal training and so on) and by using decision-making tools, different strategies will be defined. The user will be able to use the tool to add specific competences in which the institution is interested to the general competence catalogue, and also will be able to view other competences added by the learner, which will facilitate analysis of the information. The institutional environment and the competence catalogue also will use these interfaces.

Deliverable 14. Competence Catalogue Development

This deliverable will consist of the development of a component that will manage a set of general competences, institutional competences and those defined by the user. The list of initial competences will be introduced at the beginning of the project and the specific institutional ones will be incorporated during the pilots. Also competences defined by the user will be incorporated when she tags an activity. The list of
personally defined competences will be open to the incorporation of new competences during the project life. The catalogue will include a web-service based interface to make it accessible by the ILC in the collection stage, with which the user can tag her informal activities, and by the institutional environment in the visibility layer of the activity flow.

Deliverable 15. Institutional Environment

The institutional environment is a deliverable that integrates analysis and decision-making tools. It will provide an interface through which the information about instances of informal learning and competences made visible by the learner can be viewed, allowing the user to take decisions. Those decisions could be used for different purposes. The tools that it includes are going to be based on the most representative techniques in decision-making such as visual analytics or data mining, techniques such as tagclouds, spiral time-lines, information sector analysis, treemaps, and so on will be used.
This environment is going to be connected to the competence catalogue and the repository in order to have all necessary information in for the analysis of the information.