European Competence development: Support of European integration by enhancing the innovations in the European vocational education and training sector with the example of eCOTOOL

This article points out the special support that competence models can provide for the quality development in learning, education, and training: The European competence development benefits from new and innovative approaches called competence modelling. Here we can only highlight the main characteristics of this trend and its relevance in vocational education and training. A general competence model with a standardized competence structure and levels is introduced by the European initiative eCOTOOL and discussed for several use cases. It can be shown that competence modelling and the presented competence definition and structure lead to an improvement of the vocational education and training and the working places, of the organizational and individual development, in many use cases places.

Rural Observatory 2.0: Storing and Managing Resources for Training Rural SMEs in the usage of ICT

Small and Medium Enterprises constitute the backbone of European economy. Therefore it becomes evident that improving the adoption and efficient usage of ICT solutions by SMEs should be a primary goal for all involved stakeholders. Such a strategy becomes even more challenging in regard to SMEs that operate in rural areas, due to specific constraints they have to confront with. Rural Inclusion, a project supported by the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme of the European Commission, aims to adopt, adapt, and deploy a Web infrastructure, in rural settings, combining semantics with a collaborative training and networking approach, offering e-government services that will be supported by a rigorous and reusable service process analysis and modeling, and facilitating the disambiguation of the small businesses needs and requirements when trying to carry out the particular transactions. The approach is complemented by a number of other applications that support the creation of communities of learning, practice and experience exchange, in rural settings, thus enhancing the uptake of e-government-based innovation process throughout rural areas.

Development of innovative ICT-based content and services for learning objects in Organic Agriculture through the CerOrganic Web Portal

The CerOrganic Web Portal has been designed and it is under development an innovative online database for the supporting ICT-based training material, services pedagogies and practice for lifelong learning. It is the outcome of the Leonardo da Vinci project CerOrganic for the identification of the training needs and qualifications of agricultural experts in order to be able to serve as farmer advisors on modern and accurate Organic Agriculture methods and practices, focusing on a pilot group of candidate advisors from four pilot testing countries around Europe (i.e. Belgium, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece and Hungary); This paper demonstrates the facilities of an online database for mapping the providing training opportunities (like courses, modules and units) with the required competences for targeted stakeholders in filed of Organic Agriculture.

Identifying the Training Content Needs in Vocational Education & Training Projects: The Organic.Balkanet Case

Organic.Balkanet is an LdV EU project which started in December 2009, aiming at the development of the skills of Organic Agriculture trainers in Balkan countries. For this purpose, the project identified the training needs in each of the participating countries and intends to develop a basic training curriculum as well as specialized curricula focusing on the specific needs of each of the participating countries. In this context, an analysis of the existing training content, including the contributed by the project partners and the publicly available, was performed and the results of this analysis are presented in this short paper.

Organic.Lingua: A community oriented approach for a truly multilingual platform providing access to multilingual learning objects

Organic.Lingua is a 36 month project demonstrating the potential of a multilingual Web portal for sustainable Agricultural & Environmental Education. The project started in March 2011, partly funded by the European Commission under the 7th European Union’s Framework and is aiming to enhance the existing Organic.Edunet portal, introducing automated multi-lingual services that will further support the uptake of the portal and the aggregated content, facilitate the multilingual features and further extend the portal’s geographical reach and linguistic coverage. This short paper provides insight on our approach for capitalizing on the European and international demand for educational content on Organic Agriculture and Agroecology by transforming the Organic.Edunet portal into a truly international platform with multilingual services, tools and content.