Towards agile competence development
Freddy Limpens, Denis Gillet · 2012
This paper discusses our approach to competence development where learners can have on-demand access to competences by taking part in a currency-free competence exchange scheme. The main idea covered in this paper is to integrate lightweight competence management features within a collaborative social media platform. Our focus was to keep the entry barrier to using the system as low as possible and to stick to the context of usage through the recommendation features of an already existing social media platform. To achieve this, we extended Graaasp, an Opensocial-based container that allows users to organize their collaborative work through web spaces and supports context-aware recommendations. Thanks to this tool and our extension, learners can quickly turn into timely providers of their own skills by giving coaching sessions in exchange of reusable credits. Any user of Graaasp can furthermore make discoverable or find competences, arrange informal teaching sessions and get reusable credits in return, all this in a continuous and context-centered environment.