vocational education

Mobile Devices penetration has exceeded 100% in many European countries. At the same time, device manufacturers have raised the bar with the introduction and success of sophisticated portable devices like iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Google Nexus, tablets, etc. who have already demonstrated good potentials for mobile learning (e.g. ITunesU). At the same time, these modern learning tools which have the potential to alter the educational experience seem to be entirely separated from pedagogy since they simply do not fit with existing pedagogies. This gap from modern learning tools to state-of-the-art pedagogy should be bridged.

From the societal point of view, as society becomes increasingly hectic and knowledge-based, adult employees of all levels are obliged to adopt more vocational education activities to renew, update or certify knowledge and skills in order to remain competitive in the workplace and to accommodate to an increasingly technological environment. On top of that, as documented by the 'New Skills for New Jobs' priority (launched in 2008 by the European Commission): Skills upgrading is critically important for Europe's short-term recovery from the crisis and longer term growth and productivity, for its jobs and its capacity to adapt to change, for equity, gender equality and social cohesion. It is also stated: Too little is done to increase and adapt the skills of an ageing workforce.

Having identified these facts (technological, pedagogical and societal), the main challenge of the MOVE-ON project is to increase the overall volume of participation of adult professionals in learning and vocational education by focusing on the possibilities offered by the portable devices widely adopted lately as the new access medium to learning. MOVE-ON’s expectation is to motivate, enable and support busy adult professionals in learning on-the-move or at 'non-places'.

More specifically MOVE-ON aims at:

• Designing, developing and valorizing a novel mLearning pedagogical approach based on the recent developments in pedagogy which move away from the transmissive, behavioral models and more toward the constructivist models (learning from experience) while place the active learner at the heart of activities.
• Developing and valorizing an innovative and attractive all inclusive mlearning system that will support acquisition of knowledge while on-the-move or at the 'non-place' and offer self-directed personal development in new contexts.
• Targeting adult professionals from all over Europe, users of mobile & other portable devices (tablets) with multimedia reproduction capabilities, who lack free-time and are conscious about their educational needs.
• Designing and developing learning material (courses) that cover a selection of subjects and skills that according to studies demonstrate growing demand from employers across all levels of employees. This material will be easily adaptable for different portable devices and organized into smaller learning units (max. 10 min duration) that fit the transient context of mobile use and the MOVE-ON pedagogy.
• Offering a multilingual service where the system itself and the educational material will be available in several languages (initially all of the partners’ languages expandable to other languages later).

Feedback from pilot testing will provide insight into the appropriate educational approaches that suit the mobile context and motivate mobile users to engage with the MOVE-ON service.