European Lifelong Competence Development: Requirements and Technologies for Its Realisation

In the TenCompetence project, we aim to address the growing need for lifelong development with an open source framework for competence development programmes. We envisage that the framework will be used for formal, non-formal and informal learning activities; learning units will be created and shared in a distributed manner in learning networks, and peer-to-peer learning activities will be highly important. In this paper, we give an overview of the requirements and techniques needed to achieve this goal. Methods for learner assessment are needed for individualizing learning programmes. The system should provide functionality to position the learner in and around learning programmes, and to generate personalized navigation paths that match the learner goal; in addition, learners should be able to organize their learning process and to communicate. We discuss several existing tools and standards that may be used as a basis for the framework.