Competence Based Educational Metadata for Supporting Lifelong Competence Development Programmes

In the context of the emerging paradigm of lifelong learning, competence-based learning is gradually attracting the attention of the technology-enhanced learning community, since it appears to meet the training expectations of both individuals and organisations. On the other hand, the paradigm of learning objects retains, to a large extent, its initial anticipations and, supported by educational metadata, it is still influencing technology-enhanced learning system design. Nevertheless, the IEEE LOM Specification does not directly support the description of learning resources in terms of their relevance to competence-based learning programmes. In this paper we target addressing this problem, that is, we identify and study the main issues related to the competence-relevant characteristics of learning resources and propose an IEEE LOM competence application profile that can be used for tagging educational resources in a competence-meaningful manner.