Seeking for learning evaluation (SEELE)

Dates: November 2007 - October 2008

Coordinator: Instituto Pólitécnico de Viana do Castelo

Funded by The EU Leonardo da Vinci programme

The growing need in lifelong learning programmes, as a way of increase competitiveness, has resulted in the development of several learning systems, namely the e-learning systems. This kind of learning allows, especially in SMEs, to make more flexible the training of the employees. However this kind of training is not well recognized by the employers and also by the employees. It’s important, as a measure to increase quality and credibility, to improve the quality of training. To improve that quality we need a methodology that can evaluate all the process and also a process that assures the acquisition of competences in the end of the the training.

Therefore, are project seeks to develop a set of methodologies that evaluate, in a concrete way, all the elearning process in Micro and SMEs. With some of the results of E VAL-3, another Leonardo Project, we will develop and improve a tool, especially oriented, to a public with low qualifications that can evaluate the elearning process and also measure the competences obtained in training. In the normal development of our project we believe we can promote, evaluating its results, the elearning system as a reliable training system, and by this way increase the confidence of Micro and SMEs in the expected results of the distance training processes. It is important to emphasize that the most important result of this project is the promotion of quality in distance based training systems.

Our partnership is composed with a variety of public and private organizations. We have the participation of High Education Institutions that will mainly participate in the development, evaluation and revision of the sought methodologies. We also have the participation of Enterprise Association that will make the bridge between the training facilitators and the Micro and SMEs. Our partnership is completed with the Training Organizations/Facilitators. These will be involved in the development of the models, in their evaluation and revision and mainly in the process of experimentation the obtained models.

The most important tangible outcomes of this project will be the growing use of Micro and SMEs in distance training systems (elearning) and the recognition of the evaluation process by the competence recognition and validation organizations.
As intangible outcomes we can say it will be the effective increase, as we can measure the efficiency of the output results, in the training quality. As this is a project that pretends to evaluate the method of learning it is feasible that all the training results will improve.

In a more general way, we can say that our project will allow to adapt and re-adapt the pedagogic, technological and information methods to the real needs of employees and employers training, keeping in mind that to have quality, whichever kind of training we are referring, it is important to verify in an effective way the competence acquainted during the training. It is, thus, believed that this project will contribute to create a new kind of learning approach that satisfies all the requisites for the validation and efficiency of the outcome results.