Evaluating the Effectiveness of Personalised Recommender Systems in Learning Networks

In view of the professional development concept, learning can no longer be considered to be part of childhood and youth alone, but is becoming a lifelong achievement. Professional development no longer remains limited to the context of a regular school or university campus, but is becoming integrated into workplace learning and personal development, where formal and informal learning activities are intertwined. Professionals find themselves placed at centre-stage, which means that no longer a teacher or teaching institute is responsible for the learning process but that they now are responsible for their own learning processes (Longworth 2003; Shuell 1992). Taking up on this responsibility, professionals need to become selfdirected (Brockett and Hiemstra 1991), and might be performing different learning activities in different contexts at the same time. On the one hand learners are becoming free to decide what, when, where and how they want to learn, and on the other hand they are forced to be responsible for their own professional competence development.