Self-Development of Competences for Social Inclusion Using the TENCompetence Infrastructure

This paper describes a pilot study centred on the technology-enhanced self-development of competences in lifelong learning education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Àgora. The pilot study shows that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure, i.e. in this case the Personal Development Planner tool, provides various kinds of benefits for adult participants with low educational profiles and who are traditionally excluded from the use of innovative learning technologies and the knowledge society. The selforganized training supported by the PDP tool aims at allowing the learners to create and control their own learning plans based on their interests and educational background including informal and non-formal experiences. In this sense, the pilot participants had the opportunity to develop and improve their competences in English language (basic and advanced levels) and ICT competence profiles which are mostly related to functional and communicative skills. Besides, the use of the PDP functionalities, such as the self-assessment, the planning and the self-regulating elements allowed the participants to develop reflective skills. Pilot results also provide indications for future developments in the field of technology support for self-organized learners. The paper introduces the context and the pilot scenario, indicates the evaluation methodology applied and discusses the most significant findings derived from the pilot study

The use of technology as one of the possible means of performing instructor tasks: Putting technology acceptance in context.

For many instructors in higher education, use of a learning management system (LMS) is de facto mandatory. Nevertheless, instructors often have much freedom in deciding which functionalities of the LMS they use; that is, whether they perform each individual instructor task using the LMS. Alternatively, they may perform one specific instructor task using alternative means, or, quite often, not perform it at all. The current Technology Acceptance model (TAM) fails to describe this decision process accurately, as TAM (1) does not focus on the level of the individual task; (2) does not make a distinction between not performing a task and performing a task using alternative means; and (3) does not recognize one important factor that affects the performance of a specific task - task importance. A test of three different models shows that the decision process is best represented as a two-step process. First, influenced by task importance, a choice is made to either perform a specific task or not. Second, after the decision has been made to perform the task, and influenced by the usefulness and ease of use of the LMS, a choice is made between performing the task using the LMS and using alternative means. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Multilevel Mixed Intact Group Analysis: A Mixed Method to Seek, Detect, Describe and Explain Differences Between Intact Groups

Educational innovations often involve intact subgroups, such as school classes or university departments. In small-scale educational evaluation research, typically involving 1 to 20 subgroups, differences among these subgroups are often neglected. This article presents a mixed method from a qualitative perspective, in which differences among intact subgroups regarding one construct or effect are first quantitatively identified and subsequently qualitatively described and explained by differences among the contexts of the separate intact subgroups. Its focus on the contexts of intact subgroups, where organizational factors can be modified, makes this method interesting from a management perspective. In evaluations, repeated application of the method deserves a place beside other analytical methods