Competence-related Metadata for Educational Resources that Support 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 21 Century learning and training expectations of both individuals and organisations. On the other hand, the paradigm of Learning Objects as a way to organize, manage, offer and use digital learning resources retains, to a large extent, its initial anticipations and, supported by Educational Metadata, it is still influencing TechnologyEnhanced Learning system design. However, there not exist yet, a commonly accepted proposal for metadata that could describe competence-related characteristics of educational resources that support Lifelong Competence Development Programmes. In this paper we target addressing this issue, that is, we identify and study the main issues related to the competence-relevant characteristics of educational resources, taking into critical consideration the current state-of-the-art information models for competence descriptions (such as IEEE RCD and HR-XML) and we propose an IEEE LOM Competence-based Application Profile that can be used for tagging educational resources in a competence-meaningful manner.