The rise and change of the competence strategy: reflections on twenty-five years of skills policies in the EU

The principal aim of this article is to provide a historical overview of 25 years of competence policy in the European Union, highlighting connections between past and current initiatives and outlining possible scenarios for the decade to come. The article presents the social investment turn in social policy as the critical political background against which the emergence of a competence strategy in European Union education policy should be analysed and understood. The competence strategy, it is argued, finds its roots in a renewed attention at the European Union level for harmonising educational outputs and labour market demands. While trying to produce a schematic history of the emergence and change of the competence strategy, the article does not seek to offer strict definitions of competence itself; instead, it conveys the nebulous and context-dependent nature of the concept

University students’ self-regulated learning using digital technologies

Abstract Analysing the process by which students—whether at university or not—manage and facilitate their own learning has been a recurrent educational research problem. Recently, the question arises about how the development of strategies taking place during the aforementioned process could be made easier by using technologies. In an effort to know whether university students really use digital technologies to plan, organize and facilitate their own learning, we have proposed three research questions. Which technologies do university students use to self-regulate their learning? What self-regulated learning strategies do they develop using technologies? What profiles could be identified among students based on their use of self-regulation strategies with technology? To answer these questions, the “Survey of Self-regulated Learning with Technology at the University” was designed. Information from a sample group with 711 students from various universities located in the region of Andalusia (Spain) was collected with this survey. The results indicate that university students, even when they are frequent users of digital technology, they tend not to use these technologies to regulate their own learning process. Of all technologies analysed, Internet information search and instant communication tools are used continually. In turn, the most generalised self-regulation learning strategies are those relative to social support. Nevertheless, students differ from each other regarding their use and frequency. There are groups of students who make use of self-regulation strategies when learning with technologies. In this regard, two distinctive groups of students have been identified, who show differentiated self-regulated levels

The Move to Online Teaching: A Head of Department’s Perspective

Integrating online teaching strategies within universities is now well established, but there is little on how HE teachers experience this shift. One strand of literature suggests that university senior management teams often assume academic staff lack motivation to participate and resist change. This case study, from a Head of Department’s perspective, challenges that view. Focusing on academics who chose to move to the Open University, an online and distance learning provider, it argues that teaching online requires different skills and presents a fundamental challenge to teacher identity. It concludes that there is a need to both understand the academics’ perspective and acknowledge that there is motivation within the academic community; and support, at all institutional levels, is critical for academics making this transition

The Go-Betweens: Backstage Collaboration Among Community Managers in an Inter-organisational Enterprise Social Network

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have made inroads into many workplaces demonstrating their usefulness for enabling collaboration, information sharing and new forms of knowledge work. Yet, at the same time many organisations have fallen short of reaping such benefits since ESN, as malleable technologies, require a form of bottom-up sense-making for appropriate use cases and work practices to form and emerge. This runs counter to established, usually top-down implementation techniques. As a result, a new role has been established in many organisations to look after ESN implementation, that of the community manager. As a middle management role, community managers face challenges of mediating between management expectations and worker wants and needs, in addition to looking after the emerging ESN community. In this paper we study an inter-organisational ESN platform that offers a place for community managers from different organisations to engage in collaborative work to come to grips with their role and devise strategies for successful ESN adoption and use in their respective organisations. By employing Ervin Goffman’s theatre lens, we come to understand this ESN as a backstage channel that allows community managers to ‘share secrets’ and foster ‘collegiality’ as a way to cope with the demands of their role. We provide practical implications for stakeholders involved in malleable technology implementation and outline future research directions