This university located in a big city in Poland counts with more or less 40000 students. The pilot was developed with a group of 13 third year students. From this universe, a sample of 15 students (with ages between 18-40 years old) engaged with the TRAILER tool and only 7 were considered active users, showing 61% of actions performed in the 2 platforms. In the educational context, this participation was the one that recorded a higher value of the average number of competences added per informal learning activity (ILA), even though inferior to the generality of professional contexts cases. They also presented a high number of users competences, even though none of them was validated in the second pilot. However in terms of published activities, the number is also low, following the pattern of the other cases.
They presented a fair prior recognition of informal learning (IL), which greatly improved with the work developed in this pilot. They scored the most important activity that potentially develops their IL as being “Conversations”. In general, comparing with other cases, they show the higher level of agreement relatively to the need for IL activities in “being better prepared to find a job” and “developing a deeper knowledge”.
They stressed that one of the advantages of this idea was being able to share their IL with others. As they see it: at the university this tool could be very valuable for students who are studying at different specializations so they could share their own resources with others on Portfolio; in big corporations where people are quite anonymous, for creating the project teams, sharing knowledge and IL resources and managing the competences within company; ultimately it could be used to search for people with similar competences and use their links for enriching our IL resources. Some also point out that this was a nice tool for creating showcases, which may be helpful when looking for the job since nowadays employers are paying more attention to the candidate’ IL competences.
There were several usability issues reported related to operational procedures and they stressed that the tool should be less time consuming and more intuitive. They would also suggest it could work on android and smartphones, in order to expand the usage of the tool more widely.
The person contacted to participate in the second pilot was the head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Management. He agreed that the educational and business environment was becoming more aware of the importance of IL. Also that this tool represented a good way of keeping IL outcomes alive, available, visible and updated. He also shared that he believed that it could play the role of the bridge between the educational environment and business sector requirements and expectations.