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This report responds to OECD's questions by providing information on policies and activities in British Columbia. Formal education, non-formal and informal learning in British Columbia occur within a diversified post-secondary educational system, consisting of both public and private institutions. Components covered include: Demographic change; Internationalization; New ICT; Economic development and skills shortage/mismatch; Social developments; Description of institutional arrangements; Government and the role of government; Resources; Qualifications, qualification systems, qualifications framework; Credit accumulation and transfer; Assessment methods and procedures; Characteristics of stakeholders; Access; Participation; Incentives and disincentives; Economic benefits; Educational benefits; Social benefits; and Personal benefits.

The pan-Canadian overview is indexed at TD/TNC 92.610. Individual province/territory reports are indexed from TD/TNC 92.611 to TD/TNC 92.620. Show less

In January, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills launched a major consultation on the role of informal learning in public life. To help to inform the consultation, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) added questions to its annual survey on adult participation in learning to find out how adults like to learn new things. The questions draw on the distinction between learning as 'participation' and learning as 'acquisition' - between learning gained informally, through discussion and reflection, and learning gained through structured activities where the learning goal, is explicit. The study confirms that, for learning outside of work, informal modes of learning are very importnat, and that learners prefer learning as participation to learning as acquisition, though they do find a wider variety of strategies useful than do learners at work. It highlights the importance and timeliness of the policy focus on informal learning, but also makes clear that learning through attendance at courses is still important for most adults. This is an important conclusion for the informal learning consultation: a blend of publicly offered classes and informal provision is the right mix for community based learning.

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The pre-eminence of knowledge and skills as the sources of wealth creation and economic growth is one of the major issues in business at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a result, human resource development has been propelled into a central role in management thinking. However, this has not always been reflected in practice since many of the methodologies for monitoring and assessment continue to reflect the previous importance of fixed capital, the industrial society and the quantity of labour employed. The police service like other public services has had to ensure that its staff is skilled to undertake an ever more complex role within society. This has traditionally been delivered through typical organisational training processes. The value of learning as opposed to training is rarely proposed. The ‘soft’ benefits of education, elements like critical thinking and emotional intelligence as well as learning, are rarely given sufficient emphasis. However, increasingly organisations are realizing the benefits of creating an open environment that allows informal learning to flourish. This article will explore the concepts of traditional training within policing before reviewing as a case study the introduction of a work-based and experiential learning paradigm within police development.

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The genesis of this article is based on the observation by the authors that the French training system has witnessed an evolution since the 1970s that corresponds to the one that was later recommended by the European authorities, i.e.: the creation of a national qualifications framework that integrates general and vocational training and initial and continuing education; and a description of qualifications in terms of occupational standards that corresponds to learning outcomes and includes the concept of competence.

[This article is] in two parts: the first describes the construction process of a national qualifications framework in France. It gives the highlights of the debates that accompanied this construct and stresses the closeness one can find with the present discussions at the European level; and basing itself on this, the second part of the article assesses the results of the implementation of this system in relation to the European goals such as the shift from a system that is steered by supply to one that is steered by demand and the better coherence of qualifications and their transparency for the users.

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Lifelong learning attracts various stories to tell the tales of its successes and futures. These stories include marginalising metanarratives, resistant counternarratives and other accounts. This paper illustrates these stories by referring to information literacy, critical theory and informal learning as gleaned from the refereed proceedings of the first four conferences.

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For new trade and industrial (T&I) teachers in the US, making the transition from industry to teaching requires them to acquire professional teaching competencies. For these teachers, formal teacher training in the area of pedagogy before entering the school workplace is unusual. The majority of them are employed in schools and beginning to teach while still attending alternative teacher preparation programs. This exploratory study aimed to investigate how new T&I teachers learn core teaching competencies and how the learning method relates to their perceptions of proficiency in these competencies. Specifically, the research examined: to what extent new T&I teachers enrolled in an alternative certification program learn the program's core teaching competencies through formal or informal learning; to what extent these teachers perceived their proficiency in the competencies; and the relationship of perceived proficiency with the extent of informal learning or formal learning. The results suggest that teachers perceived that, although they also engage in informal learning, they had learned competencies largely through formal learning methods and that they had at least average proficiency in each of the core competencies listed on the questionnaire. The study could not draw a definite conclusion as to a connection between how a competency is learned, either formally or informally, and how well it is learned. Show less

Today, lifelong learning has become much more than 'second chance' education. It has come to encompass formal education, as well as non-formal and informal education. This article looks at some of the issues relating to the assessment and certification of skills and competences in lifelong learning in France. The article discusses: formal and non-formal learning; relations between these two forms of learning and certification of non-formal learning; certification in vocational education and training; the law on retraining of the labour force; prior learning assessment (PLA); and how to measure and ensure legitimacy in assessments. In conclusion, the author states that to certify competences, they need to be proven and three questions have to be solved: (1) How to define the competence? (2) How to measure the competence? (3) How to legitimise the measure?

The issue entry for this journal is at TD/TNC 67.447. Show less

Recent notions view learning as participation in a learning environment or community where learners work together and support each other as they use information resources and tools to pursue their learning goals and solve problems. A broader meaning is to extend the idea of the learning environment to the overall setting in which learning communities come into existence, evolve, fade away, regenerate or transform. The advent of the Internet has brought about a powerful medium for creating and supporting such a notion of the learning ecology. Through the image of biological ecologies with their diversity, complex dynamics, and opportunistic niches for growth, learning problems and solutions on the Internet are explored and ways to enhance the ecology are suggested.

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This review is designed to assist the New Zealand Industry Training Federation in its efforts to encourage, support and further the development of appropriate work-based (work-related) education and training models. The review seeks to uncover the extensive amount of effective learning that occurs in the workplace, learning that is either formal, non-formal, informal or, in relation to what occurs more naturally in workplaces, all three. The authors have scanned international and New Zealand based literature from books, academic journals, and commissioned reports that discuss all aspects of workplace and related learning.

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Organisational learning is fundamentally important for business development and this article analyses and evaluates the process in smaller businesses that seek to grow through operating internationally. The requirement for organisational learning is often underestimated by those involved in the business as well as by policy makers for whom support for small businesses is a priority and this impacts negatively on the performance of the newly internationalised firm. Using a case study approach to investigate the organisational learning process of United Kingdom (UK) small businesses, the article provides a linkage between a staged model of internationalisation and the informal and often unrecorded learning experiences of those involved in the venture. The key learning requirements of the internationalisation process are identified and important elements in the transfer of learning from the individual to the organisational level are analysed.

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