Research context
Competences are managed by people and organisations at many different levels in formal definitions, profiles, needs and development plans. The descriptions of these competences may be complex and extensive, and a person who wants to make sense of the overall picture at any given level of granularity is confronted with a demanding task. This is task is even more complex if it involves more than one level, for example a human resources manager may have to look up to a higher level analyse the position of her company in the sector, and then explain the resulting competence development strategy to the employees in her organisation.
Taking a simpler example which does not involve multiple levels the tasks which are involved are still complex. Someone seeking to improve her competence profile has to:
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Find a place which defines the competence profile and competences which will enable her to meet her personal development goals
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Map her present competence profile onto the competences that she has identified
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Identify competence development opportunities which will enable her to acquire the additional competences which she needs.
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Select and carry out a set of competence development programmes
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Present her competence profile to prospective employers
Valuable work has been done to provide methodologies and tools which support these processes, but they are limited by being oriented to institutions which are responsible for generating and managing the information, rather than to the learner. As a result users are given the responsibility for keeping track of and coordinating all the sources, documents and activities which enable them to move this process forward. The goal of the TENCompetence Personal Competence Manager is to simplify such tasks, and so to make Life Long Learning more agile and effective, and more responsive to the needs of learners.
Functional innovation
The Personal Competence Manager is a new type of application which supports users in managing their competence development activities across a wide range of contexts. It enables them to
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establish search for and participate in communities related to competence development goals
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formulate, search for and edit competence development profiles
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formulate, search for and edit competence development plans
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create, share and find competence development activities and resources
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carry out competence development activities
The Personal Competence Manager is unique in enabling users to manage all these aspects of their competence development, across the range of the contexts in which they are active.
The word "personal" does not indicate that the system is primarily focused on the representation and manipulation of competence information at the level of the individual person who has a competence development need. Rather it indicates that the different levels of competence related information (profiles, competence development networks, competence development plans) are presented in a way which is consistent with the individual users' personal view of the domain. All activities can be carried out individually or in groups defined for each context of activity.
Similarly use of the term "competence development" does not mean that the system is focused only on the development of competences. Indeed the PCM can be seen as a environment which unifies the processes of representing competences, planning competence development programmes, and coordinating competence development networks, as well as facilitating competence development activities. Thus the system is personal for the author of competence development programmes as much as it is personal for the participant in those programmes.
Technical innovation
The TENCompetence Personal Competence Manager has been designed to make turn the TENCompetence Domain Model into a working system. This has required the development of a new architecture and applications. The system consists of TENCompetence servers which manage the competence development information, including
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The networks they create and join
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Competence development programmes they define and choose
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Competence development activities they create or participate in
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Knowledge resources which they publish or use (links to the web, or files)
The servers also access other information provided by generic services.
A rich client (Java Rich Client Platform) has been developed which accesses the various TENComptence servers, and other services. This adds a presentation layer, and provides tools that the user can use to edit data on the servers. Contextualised communities, chat and forum services are provided for all functionality.
The current PCM client includes all the functionality which may be needed to manage competence development, but profiles of this functionality are under development for more focused user groups. Also under development is a Web client to provide an alternative approach to accessing the functionality provided by the server.
Impact
The PCM is currently in use in pilots, and version 0.1.2 is publicly released. The application will be launched in late 2007. The PCM has been presented EADL 2007 in Dublin, and ePortfolio 2007 in Maastricht. It will also be demonstrated at Online Educa 2007.