Versatile Vocational and educational training Vehicle

V3 is aimed at designing, implementing, deploying, evaluating and exploiting a versatile, user-friendly, ICT-based Vocational and Educational Training (VET) framework suited for both young people in initial training as well as adult involved in lifelong learning activities.

The need for Europeans to increase their professional skills and employability has been emphasized by the Lisbon European Council in March 2000. This need has been since addressed by a large variety of projects and initiatives and a number ob innovative tools for generating training contents have been proposed. However, many of them have not succeeded in establishing a landmark in the long run, due to a lack of versatility and user-friendliness. Unfortunately, they have not been endorsed by trainers on a large scale, due to the significant amount of resources trainers had to dedicate in order to generate and update contents with such tools. Trainers often gave up their ambitious initial plans, hence exposing their trainees to incomplete and/or outdated material.

Drawing conclusions from these facts, the ambition of V3 is first to design and implement a versatile, user-friendly training framework requiring a limited investment from the trainer to achieve a performing competence building process with his/her trainees. Seminars presented by the trainer on his/her own computer will be recorded with the help of an open-source, add-on software merging screen and voice activities. Versatility of the content will be achieved through the capture of screen shots, enabling to embed not only slides presentation, but also demonstrations, etc. Life broadcast through computer networks is to be considered as well as a secondary objective. Automatic indexing tools will be applied to the resulting audiovisual file, in order to enable searches through a collection of files and to facilitate navigation within each of them. The audiovisual files, to be compliant with public encoding and indexing standards like MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group) and SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), will be made available through the Learning Management System (LMS) platform of the trainer's organisation, where a personalised learning process will be organised to the benefit of the trainee, by drawing a pathway across the available modules, taking into account both his/her formal and informal skills.

In a second stage, it is the ambition of the V3 project to deploy, evaluate and exploit the implemented training framework within the consortium to seek for feed-back from both trainers and trainees. This stage will also enable the first steps towards the building of a portfolio of learning material covering specific areas of expertise of the partners, available in a variety of Community languages.

To conclude, the advantages of the V3 framework are its user-friendliness, for both trainer and trainee, the personalisation of the trainee's learning process, the versatility of training material it enables to deliver, and the compliance with public standards and open source philosophy.