PROLEARN Roadmap for TEPL

We have created in PROLEARN a roadmap toward professional learning in 2020. We came up with 6 vision statements as follows:

• Vision statement I: “Everyone should be able to learn anything at anytime at anyplace.” The main goal is to provide the right learning experiences at the right time for the right person. The statement is closely linked to the IST challenge. It embraces issues of digital convergence of communication networks, media, content and devices. The new capabilities offered by recent advances in mobile and internet communications can support and facilitate mobility towards a lifelong learning environment, enabling the creation, storage, management and access to knowledge everywhere and every time. The aim is to create and deliver a personalized learning experience to everyone.

• Vision statement II: “Learning as a means to support and enhance work performance.” The main goals are to support human performance improvements and to provide links between business processes, competencies and learning processes; and use TEPL to design high quality work-based learning activities so that learning and working becomes interlocked. The statement is related to specific industry challenges, such as performance support and performance improvements at the work place.

• Vision statement III: “Promote innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship at work.” This vision encompasses a variety of goals such as: a) Learning supporting radical change in an organization and improving ability to change; and b) Competency development (including thinking out of the box, creativity, asking the right questions, leadership). The statement is related to industry challenges such as investment and development of the company’s human capital and use of learning to support ability to change in organization

• Vision statement IV: “Learning as a means to increase employability.” This statement focuses on the Learner’s perspective, the employees’ continuous professional development, and the need to increase employability. The goals in this vision include resilience, employability, getting skilled faster and personal growth. Enhanced mobility, employability and competency of the European workforce. Portability of learning achievements is one of the key-issues to be addressed.

• Vision statement V: Market take-up. “Professional e-learning will be a commodity market in 2015.” This statement focuses on market take up of TEPL and the ability to purchase content and learning services regardless of type and country of the learner supplier in a unified transparent market. The main goals in this vision include market transparency, consumer driven market, one-stop-shopping, wider choice at all levels, and selection optimization. Development of both segments of the market: from the low end commodity market to the high end upscale, high value added segment. There are two alternative ways to achieving this vision. One is about the commodity market being based on the “canned courses” concept, while the other is based on communities of practice and collaborative creation and sharing of professional know-how.

• Vision statement VI: Socially inclusion. “High quality learning for all”. This statement addresses social inclusion issues, such as digital divide, the gap between poor and rich etc. The goal will be to democratize knowledge provision and to support the so-called e-Inclusion and equal opportunities for all in the workplace.

Then, a Gap Analysis phase started during which, a comparison between the state of the art and the vision statements was performed in order to identify the Gaps between what is available today and what is needed for the future, set capability targets and requirements and derive the strategy (Actions/Recommendations) needed to fill these Gaps. Our approach has aimed to identify the current strengths (existing capabilities), weaknesses (missing or inadequate capabilities), opportunities (key future capabilities) and capability-related threats (problematic factors such as competition for sources of capabilities and resources needed to acquire new capabilities or re-direct existing capabilities) and which will contribute to the realization of the visions.

The result of this work is captured in PROLEARN Deliverable D12.5 "Roadmap for TEPL" that can be accessed here.

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