In our rapidly changing societies, citizens need to develop competences which allow them to successfully manage the challenges posed by the many transitions taking place in their work, in their personal spheres, and in society (JRC, 2020).

The 22 July 2020, an important and timely framework was launched by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC), the LifeComp, the European competence framework on Personal, Social and Learning to Learn.  JRC has developed several competence frameworks, the "Comp" family by #DigComp, #DigCompEdu, #DigCompOrg, #SELFIE,#Entrecomp, and now, #LifeComp.

Maybe, one of the previous most wellknown one is the DigComp 2.0 framework, which identifies the key components of digital competence in 5 areas which can be summarized as:1) Information and data literacy, 2) Communication and collaboration, 3) Digital content creation, 4) Safety, and 5) Problem solving, and problably also #SELFIE

This framework is really welcomed and I really hope It will be implemented and in use for Education and training. Its really urgent to change perspectives and to transform Education into these directions.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) developed the LifeComp framework on behalf of, and in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport, and Culture (DG EAC). This is the third competence framework for individuals the JRC has contributed to develop, following the already consolidated Digital Competence Framework for Citizens, also known as DigComp, and the Entrepreneurship Competence Framework, EntreComp. JRC believe that LifeComp is a crucial complement to these and other frameworks, and maybe even constitutes the base line, as it deals with life skills – the skills and competences that everybody should continually develop throughout life. The LifeComp framework is a conceptual reference framework; more work will be needed to put the framework into practice, and to guide stakeholders on its implementation. 

The JRC report is part of their research on ‘Learning and Skills for the Digital Era’. Since 2005, more than 25 major studies have been undertaken in this area, resulting in more than 120 publications. More information on all of our studies can be found on the JRC Science hub

As according to the researchers LifeComp competences are teachable. They can be learned through formal or informal education.

"It is possible to teach a person to be a critical thinker, to control their emotions or to become more empathetic towards others. These skills are fundamental for people to be able to determine their own career paths and for their own well-being"

The researchers thus hope that the formalization of the skills into a framework will encourage schools and teachers to devote more time for them in the learning programmes.

The LifeComp framework is well aligned with the UNESCO initiative Futures of Education: Learning to become, which goes beyond  the UNESCO SDGs and education for all, and targeting for education 2050. The Initiatives rethinks how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet. The Futures of education initiative goes beyond the SDG and target for Education 2050. This initiative aims to rethink education and shape the future. The initiative catalyzes a global debate on how knowledge, education and learning must be rethought in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty and precariousness.

Overview of the LifeComp framework

The LifeComp framework is a flexible tool that can be adapted to different learning settings, and target groups to support the development of the Personal, Social and Learning to Learn competences in a sociocultural context. Both formal, non-formal, and informal education can contribute to the acquisition of these competences.

As a rule, the definition of "competence" includes knowledge, skills and attitudes. However, a holistic perspective that understands the interdependence between the elements of the framework as a complex ecosystem can be more effective. Indeed, the key competence comprises elements with different profiles and characteristics. For example, some focus on attitudes as dispositions and orientations for action; others represent a range of competences. 

To cope with a given situation, individuals activate a range of competences that vary according to the requirements of the situation. All the competences included in the framework are therefore equally relevant, necessary, interrelated and interconnected and should be treated as parts of a whole.

Based on this framework, these are the nine skills that can help people of all ages to manage the challenges and changes in their personal and professional lives. 

The Personal domain includes 

1. Self-regulation: Awareness and management of emotions, thoughts and behaviour

2. Flexibility: Ability to manage transitions and uncertainty, and to face challenges

3. Wellbeing: Pursuit of life satisfaction, care of physical, mental and social health, and adoption of a sustainable lifestyle

The Social domain includes:

1. Empathy: The understanding of another person’s emotions, experiences and values, and the provision of appropriate responses

2. Communication: Use of relevant communication strategies, domain-specific codes and tools depending on the context and the content

3. Collaboration: Engagement in group activity and teamwork acknowledging and respecting others

The Learning to learn domain includes:

1. Growth mindset: Belief in one’s and others’ potential to continuously learn and progress

2. Critical thinking: Assessment of information and arguments to support reasoned conclusions and develop innovative solutions

3. Managing learning: The planning, organizing, monitoring and reviewing of one's own learning

The LifeComp framework emphasizes the importance of social and personal skills. It aims to systemize the strengthening of these competences through education and lifelong learning.

The domains are shown in Table 2, and as a visualized metaphor as a glance as in Figure 5, and as the LifeComp Ecosystem in Figure 6. It is important to take a holistic approach and to see the ecosystem of the LifeComp,

Source: Sala, A., Punie, Y., Garkov, V. and Cabrera Giraldez, M., LifeComp: The European Framework for Personal, Social and Learning to Learn Key Competence, EUR 30246 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2020, ISBN 978-92-76-19418-7 (online),978-92-76-19417-0 (print), doi:10.2760/302967 (online),10.2760/922681 (print), JRC120911

A Blogpost on this theme has been published 26 July 2020 at the DISK project Blog, as this project deals with Digital comptences and Digital Survival Kit for Digital Immigrants.

The project aims to develop the digital literacy of adults Adult Education (AE) with a special focus on the so-called "digital immigrants", who are DC disadvantaged in society due to their lack of digital literacy and are therefore among the less educated DC) and enable them to take an active role in the digital society.

The objectives are the design, implementation and evaluation of 15 modules teaching different specific topics of everyday life and covering DCs as "Digital Immigrants Survival Kit" (DISK), the use of "flipped learning 3.0" as a training approach, the creation of an innovative self-evaluation tool based on competence-based self-evaluation mandalas, the development of a guide on transferability and implementation, the flexible transfer of results and outcomes to other European countries and finally the publication of the modules of the DISK toolkit as Open Educational Resources (OER).

There are five Intellectual Outcomes (IoS) as below in the screenshot. All IoS will be translated into the partner languges; German, Greek, Italian, Portuguise, and Swedish.

PARTNERS

The consortium consists of 5 partners (3 adult education organizations, one university and one specialist in course quality and open learning resources OER) with complementary skills, experience and approaches in adult education.

The applicant is the University of Porto, which will focus on adults with lower educational levels and provide opportunities for their further education, integration and full participation as European Citizens and for their survival in a digitalised world. 3 Adult Training organizations are well distributed in Europe and have complementary approaches to Adult Education: Edrase, GR is very experienced in training in remote locations, EFQBL, AT has a specific focus on older people, while Training 2000, IT is a professional training AE organization that offers training for all age groups of adults. Ossiannilsson Quality in Open Online Learning (QOOL) Consultancy is a Swedish organization that focuses on the quality of training and publication as OER.

PROJECT Results
The results can be expressed as to serve in nano, micro, meso and macro levels.

In the project Blog, results are presented on  regular base. The latest post is on Digital Competences of European Citizens

I have written two, one 21 July 2020 on Why OER (Open Educational Resources) Matters

and one 18 Febraury 2020 on Digital competences

Information and Disclaimer

The 24th IDEA National Online Conference on Emerging Perspectives of Open and Distance Learning organised a two days (17-18 July 2020) 24th IDEA National Online Conference on Emerging Perspectives of Open and Distance Learning.  The conference was orgainzed by University of Mumbai, Institute of Distance and Open Learning in association with Indian Distance Education Association (IDEA) & Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA).  I was honored and deligthed to be invited as Chief Guest on the 18 July 2020. I was invited by Professor Dhaneswar Harichandan, who also serve as ICDE Ambassador for the global advocacy of OER in the OER Advocacy Committe which I chair. Professor Dhaneswar Harichandan, recieved the Lifetime Achievement Award in ODL during the  Award ceremony on hte 18 July 2020. The conference gatherd approxiamtely some 1000 delegates from all over the world. Program and speakers were really on hte cutting edge in the fiueld of open and distance leaning

See the fisrt day 17 July 2920 on YouTube here

See the second day 18 July 2020 on YouTube here where i presented as Chief Guest on ICDE, ICDE OER Advocacy Committe and OER (Open Educational Resources).

Read the report here

CEMCA is supporting , Institute of Distance and Open Learning (IDOL), University of Mumbai and Indian Distance Education Association (IDEA) in organising two days (17-18 July 2020) 24th IDEA National Online Conference on Emerging Perspectives of Open and Distance Learning. In the Inaugural session of the conference, Dr. Kavita Laghate, Director IDOL; Dr. K Murali Manohar, President, IDEA; Dr. Romesh Verma, Secretary General, IDEA welcomed the dignitaries, paper presenters, participants and described the objectives of the conference introducing their respective institutions. Prof. Madhu Parhar briefly presented the activities of COL and CEMCA during the last three months. Prof. Nageshwar Rao, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University delivered Inaugural address and Dr. Avichal Kapur: Joint Secretary UGC DEB; Guest of Honour addressed the participants. Dr. Suhas Pednekar, Vice Chancellor, University of Mumbai gave the Presidential remarks and released the book "Understanding of ODL in Dual Mode Universities of India". Dr. D. Harichandan, Conference Secretary proposed a formal vote of thanks. Around 100 faculty members form different parts of the country are participating in this Conference.

Read more on OER as below. 25th November 2019 was a milestone in the feild of open education to reach the SDG4 and to acheive accessible, affordable, quality education for all, and to acheve lifelong learning, equity, equality, for human rights and social justice.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. 
OER form part of ‘Open Solutions’, alongside Free and Open Source software (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowdsourcing platforms.

UNESCO is the only UN agency with a dedicated OER programme. The term “Open Education Resource” was first coined in 2002 at a forum organised by UNESCO on Open Courseware in Higher Education. In November 2019, the 40th UNESCO General Conference adopted the UNESCO OER Recommendation which is the only international standard setting framework in this area worldwide.

UNESCO believes that universal access to information through high quality education contributes to peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. OER provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of learning and knowledge sharing as well as improve policy dialogue, knowledge-sharing and capacity-building globally.

The interesting conference OE4BW EDUSCOPE 2020 took place online 29 June -  2 July 2020.

I have myself have been mentor for the SDG7HUB iEnergy Open Library, a very interesting project led by Mojca Drevensek. 

The iEnergy Open Library will integrate many of the existing energy literacy materials produced by the EN-LITE Society and partner organisation to create a digital, smart and open library. It will allow users to find energy-related OER by choosing the energy literacy essential principles, fields of knowledge, energy-related content, and other relevant dimensions the library users are interested in. The Open Library is designed openly so that other energy-related, SDG7-supporting OER developers will be able to join the platform with their resources.

I had several presenations myself, I was doing a keynote 30 June, A presntation for the SDG7HUB 30 June, a Mentor presentation  1 July 2020, and a testimonal for the project.

The presentations were entitled and are all availble at my SlideShare

30 June Open Education, OER and quality related considerations

30 June 2020 OER AND QUALITY AN ECOSYSTEM

1 July 2020 Implementation of OER to reach the SDGs

The leading Slovenian online information portal Montel energetika.NET published an article about our successful yesterday's event.

The English version of the article is freely avilable here:

I was happy and delighted to contribute to this Blogpost for Open Government Partnership. This post is a portion of the original Creative Commons blog post. Read it here.

Currently we face both a swell of support for open educational resources (OER) and devastating upheaval of our traditional education systems. Resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, over 1.5 billion youth are out of school, countless teachers and parents are pivoting to online teaching and education systems face immense financial strain. While OER are not a magic cure for the current education crisis, there are opportunities to work with open education efforts to build greater resiliency within our learning ecosystems and also support open government efforts. 

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to retain, use, change and share the works with others. OER are one facet of open education, or efforts to make education more affordable, accessible and effective–providing unfettered access to learning to as many people as possible. Open education involves open practices, open policies and open educational resources.

Today, we have a stronger need and the established international frameworks to use OER to fuel our education efforts and collective commitments. This pandemic highlights the effects closing access to information and communication has on communities; conversely it demonstrates how essential open practices (free sharing of information, unfettered access to education materials) are to our collective human security. 

Now more than ever, governments recognize the potential of OER–and the opportunity to partner under international frameworks that support open education goals. In November 2019, UNESCO unanimously passed the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation to advance the construction of open, inclusive and participatory knowledge societies and established a Dynamic Coalition of government, civil society and private sector experts connected to support the recommendations. The OER Recommendation dovetails with SDG4efforts, emphasizing that open education can support “inclusive and equitable quality education” and “lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

How can you get involved? 

• Open education networks have provided outreach–offering “how to” webinars, support for emotional wellbeing, and lists of open resources for use. View this wikipedia article section collecting just a few of the resources and responses. 
• Join the Creative Commons open education listserv or Slack community or discuss opportunities for engagement in open education efforts with This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; or open data and open source efforts with This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

This post was written in collaboration with Jan Gondol, Ebba Ossiannilsson, Karolina Szczepaniak and Spencer Ellis.

Featured Photo by Allison Shelly/The Verbatium Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0

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