TENCompetence
TENCompetence is a 4-year EU-funded Integrated IST- TEL project that is developing a technical and organisational infrastructure for lifelong competence development.
TENCompetence supports individuals, groups and organisations in Europe in lifelong competence development by establishing the most appropriate technical and organisational infrastructure, using open source standards, sustainable and innovative technology.
With this infrastructure freely available the European Union aims to boost the European ambitions of a Knowledge Society by providing all European citizens, SMEs and other organisations easy access to facilities that enable the lifelong development of competencies and expertise in the various occupations and fields of knowledge.
The TENCompetence infrastructure supports the creation and management of networks of individuals, teams and organisations in Europe who are actively involved in the various occupations and domains of knowledge. These ‘learning networks’ support the lifelong competency development of the participants from the basic levels of proficiency up to the highest levels of excellence. The network consists of learners, educational institutes, libraries, publishers, domain-specific vendors, employers, associations, and all others who deliver services or products in a specific field.
The learning networks include:
- Competency frameworks for the different occupations/fields of knowledge
- Formal as well as informal learning facilities, including the sharing of knowledge, learning activities, units of learning and learning programmes
- The learning of individuals as well as of teams and organisations
- All levels of learning: primary, secondary and tertiary education, adult and company training and other forms of informal learning
- Social exchange mechanisms to stimulate the exchange, sharing and support between the individuals, teams and organisations within the network.
So, everyone’s learning is integrated into work and other life contexts, both formal and informal, and thus lifelong.
Furthermore, TENCompetence is developing new innovative pedagogical approaches, assessment models and organisational models for lifelong competence development. The software is being developed for the effective support of users who create, store, use and exchange knowledge resources, learning activities, units of learning and competence development programmes within a learning network. The project integrates isolated models and tools for the competence development into a common, easy-to-use infrastructure. To ensure the validity and the viability of the approach, a certain number of pilots will be run, at least in the fields of digital cinema, health care, water management and lifelong learning cities. Users will be able to follow training programmes to learn how to work with the infrastructure and instructors and companies (specifically SMEs) will be trained to deliver services concerning the infrastructure. One of the aims of TENCompetence is also to build a growing network of associated partners in order to ensure the large-scale use throughout Europe.