A Design Model for Lifelong Learning Networks

The provision of lifelong learning facilities is considered to be a major new direction for higher and distance teaching educational institutes, catering for the demands of industry and society. New ICT and learning technologies will support the seamless and ubiquitous access to lifelong learning facilities at home, at work, in schools and universities. A major question is how the design and implementation of such a facility will look like. We present a conceptual framework for the support of lifelong learning, which is based on notions from self-organization theory, learning communities, agent technologies and learning technology specifications like IMS Learning Design. A first exploratory implementation is developed and used in practice. We reflect on the findings and future directions.