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Managing Informal Learning in Engineering Contexts: The learners’ perspective

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Clara Viegas, Maria Marques, Gustavo Alves, Nikolas Galanis, Francisco Garcia-Peñalvo

According to recent studies, informal learning accounts for more than 75% of our continuous learning through life. However, the awareness of this learning, its benefits and its potential is still not very clear. In engineering contexts, informal learning could play an invaluable role helping students or employees to engage with peers and also with more experience colleagues, exchanging ideas and discussing problems. This work presents an initial set of results of the piloting phase of a project (TRAILER) where an innovative service based on Information & Communication Technologies was developed in order to aid the collection and visibility of informal learning. This set of results concerns engineering contexts (academic and business), from the learners’ perspective. The major idea that emerged from these piloting trials was that it represented a good way of collecting, recording and sharing informal learning that otherwise could easily be forgotten. Several benefits were reported between the two communities such as being helpful in managing competences and human resources within an institution.

Paper presented at CISPEE 2013 1st International Conference of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education
Porto (Portugal), 31 October – 1 November 2013

A tool to aid institutions recognize their employees competences acquired by informal learning

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Francisco J. García Peñalvo, Valentina Zangrando, Alicia García Holgado, Miguel A. Conde González, Antón M. Seoane Pardo, Marc Alier, Nikolas Galanis, Jordi López, José Janssen, Francis Brouns, Anton Finders, Adriana Flores, Peter Sloep, Dai Griffiths, Mark Johnson, Elwira Waszkiewicz, Aleksandra Mykowska, Miroslav Minovic, Milos Milovanovic, Maria A. Marques, Maria C. Viegas, Gustavo R. Alves

People do not learn only in formal educational institutions, but also throughout their lives, from their experiences, conversations, observations of others, exploration of the Internet, meetings and conferences, and chance encounters etc. However this informal and nonformal learning can easily remain largely invisible, making it hard for peers and employers to recognize or act upon it. The TRAILER project aims to make this learning visible so that it can benefit both the individual and the organization. The proposed demonstration will show a software solution that (i) helps the learners to capture, organize and classify a wide range of ‘informal’ learning taking place in their lives, and (ii) assists the organization in recognizing this learning and use it to help managing human resources (benefiting both parts). This software tool has recently been used in two phases of pilot studies, which have run in four different European countries.

Paper presented at EC-TEL 2013 Eighth European Conference On Technology Enhanced Learning Scaling Up Learning For Sustained Impact
Paphos (Cyprus), 17 – 21 September 2013

See the video about the TRAILER from institutional perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nr6UL2-b3PE

 

Managing Informal Learning in professional contexts: the learner’s perspective

Posted on by under Documents Delivered

M.A. Marques, M.C. Viegas, G. Alves, V. Zangrando, N. Galanis, J. Janssen, E. Waszkiewicz, M. Gonzalez and F. Garcia-Peñalvo

Informal Learning is present in everyone’s life but its awareness only recently has been reported. The need to keep track of the knowledge acquired this way is increasing as its sources diversity also increases. This work presents the pilots trials on the use of a tool developed to help keeping track of the learners’ informal learning, within a number of companies spread out in three countries. This tool developed through the European Commission funded project TRAILER, is still under development, which will allow integrating the set of improving suggestions obtained from users during the piloting phase. The overall idea of managing one’s informal learning was well accepted and welcomed, which validated the emerging need for a tool with this purpose.

Paper presented at EC-TEL 2013 Eighth European Conference On Technology Enhanced Learning Scaling Up Learning For Sustained Impact, Workshop on solutions that enhance informal learning recognition – WEILER
Paphos (Cyprus), 17 – 21 September 2013

adfa, p. 1, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011