Supporting lifelong learning

Welcome! The purpose of this UNIPS module is to assist teachers in supporting the development of lifelong learning competencies in university students. This can be done by raising students' awareness of the competencies needed for continuous learning and professional development and by using various interventions to scaffold students' personal development process. The material for this module consists of a learning video, other visual materials, an assignment, and literature. All materials are open for self-study and can be used as part of guided pedagogical training.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After taking this module, you are able to:

Understand the potential of supporting the students' personal development process (PDP) in enhancing their lifelong learning (LLL)
Analyse and develop learning objectives to support the development of students' lifelong learning competencies
Analyse and develop teaching and learning tasks to support the development of students' lifelong learning competencies
Analyse and develop assessment activities to support the development of students' lifelong learning competencies
Adapt interventions designed to support PDP and LLL into your own teaching

This module is about supporting the students' personal development process and the development of their lifelong learning competencies. The contents of the module were developed in an Erasmus+ project TRAINengPDP with the focus on engineering education. Nevertheless, we believe that our discoveries and ideas are easily transferred also to other disciplines and to higher education in general.

For lifelong learning - also known by the acronym LLL - this module uses the definition of Cruz et al. (2020) who describe it as “the intentional and active personal and professional learning that should take place in all stages of life and in various contexts with the aim of improving knowledge, skills and attitudes”. By LLL competencies we refer to competencies that are needed for acting as a lifelong learner as opposed to the competencies developed during lifelong learning, and conceptualise them with the help of comprehensive framework by Van den Broeck et al. (2024), which classifies lifelong learning competencies into six categories: 1) Self-regulation and self-direction, 2) Learning beliefs and strategies, 3) Autonomous motivation, 4) Information literacy, 5) Initiative and perseverance, and 6) Adaptability and resilience. The personal development process (PDP) is following the model of Patel et al. (2013) where PDP consists of five steps: Identify, prepare, act, monitor, and reflect. Learn more about both concepts (LLL and PDP) in the videos below. In addition to the videos, the learning materials of this module consist of an assignment and tools designed to help you to analyse and develop current teaching practices, get inspired by interventions designed to support LLL and PDP, and adopt some of those ideas into your own teaching.

If you want to know more about the theoretical basis of planning teaching and constructive alignment, please see the How to plan my teaching -module. If you want to learn more about the learning outcomes and designing learning modules in practice, see the How to plan my course -module.

ENG-IST TOOL

The Eng-IST tool is a flowchart designed to help educators in making a decision on which teaching intervention to use enhance the lifelong learning competencies of students. The interventions and their preconditions have been identified through literature reviews (see Van den Broeck et al. 2022) and developed further as practical tools for educators in co-creation of educators (Beagon et al. 2023). Below you can see the flowchart and explore the different interventions.

You can also download all the pictures in a pdf-format here: Eng-IST tool and interventions

REFERENCES

Beagon, U., Byrne, A., dePaor, C., Craps, S., Dujardin, R., van den Broeck, L., & Naukkarinen, J. (2023). "Help Them Grow – The ENG-IST Tool - Supporting Students’ Personal Development Process To Stimulate Lifelong Learning". European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). doi: 10.21427/7V8Q-YQ07
Cruz, M. L., Saunders-Smits, G. N., & Groen, P. (2020). "Evaluation of competency methods in engineering education: a systematic review". European Journal of Engineering Education 45(5), 729-757. doi: 10.1080/03043797.2019.1671810
Patel, S., Kitchen, G., & Barrie, J. (2013). "Personal development plans – practical pitfalls, Trends in Anaesthesia and Critical care" 3(4), 220-223. doi: 10.1016/j.tacc.2013.04.003
Van den Broeck, L., De Laet, T., Dujardin, R., Tuyaerts, S., Langie, G. (2024). "Unveiling the competencies at the core of lifelong learning: A systematic literature review". Educational Research Review 45, 100646. doi: 10.1016/j.edurev.2024.100646
Van den Broeck, L., Craps, S., Dujardin, R., Beagon, U., Byrne, A., dePaor, C., Naukkarinen, J. (2022). “Literature review on Personal Development Process (PDP) and Lifelong Learning (LLL) interventions”. TRAINeng- PDP project. Available: https://iiw.kuleuven.be/english/trainengpdp/files/pdp-lll-interventions

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS (optional)

European engineering educators podcast #13 Lynn Van den Broeck from KUL Belgium on lifelong learning
The publications of the TRAINeng-PDP project: Output — TRAINengPDP