Managing informal learning in engineering contexts: the learners' perspective

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.

Informal learning recognition through a cloud ecosystem

Learning and teaching processes, like all human activities, can be mediated through the use of tools. Information and communication technologies are now widespread within education. Their use in the daily life of teachers and learners affords engagement with educational activities at any place and time and not necessarily linked to an institution or a certificate. In the absence of formal certification, learning under these circumstances is known as informal learning. Despite the lack of certification, learning with technology in this way presents opportunities to gather information about and present new ways of exploiting an individual’s learning. Cloud technologies provide ways to achieve this through new architectures, methodologies, and workflows that facilitate semantic tagging, recognition, and acknowledgment of informal learning activities. The transparency and accessibility of cloud services mean that institutions and learners can exploit existing knowledge to their mutual benefit. The TRAILER project facilitates this aim by providing a technological framework using cloud services, a workflow, and a methodology. The services facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge associated with informal learning activities ranging from the use of social software through widgets, computer gaming, and remote laboratory experiments. Data from these activities are shared among institutions, learners, and workers. The project demonstrates the possibility of gathering information related to informal learning activities independently of the context or tools used to carry them out.

TRAILER project overview: tagging, recognition and acknowledgment of informal learning experiences

The evolution of new technology and its increasing use, have for some years been making the existence of informal learning more and more transparent, especially among young and older adults in both Higher Education and workplace contexts. However, the nature of formal and non-formal, course-based, approaches to learning has made it hard to accommodate these informal processes satisfactorily, and although technology bring us near to the solution, it has not yet achieved. TRAILER project aims to address this problem by developing a tool for the management of competences and skills acquired through informal learning experiences, both from the perspective of the user and the institution or company. This paper describes the research and development main lines of this project.