DEVELOPING A DIGITAL COMPETENCE ASSESSMENT AND ACCREDITATION PLATFORM FOR DIGITAL PROFILES

This paper reports on an ongoing project is being run whose purpose is to facilitate that digital competences and qualifications can be more easily recognized. The project is an ERASMUS+ 2016 project, where 7 organisations from five different countries are participating: Tecnalia Research & Innovation (SP), The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development (GR), All Digital (BE), FIT-The ICT Pipeline (IE), KZ Gunea (SP), Consorcio Fernando de Los Ríos (SP) and SIA Data Media Group (LV). This project has taken the DigComp (A Framework for Developing and Understanding Digital Competence in Europe) as a reference to define, assess and accredit digital profiles for entrepreneurs and virtual office worker. The aim of the project was first to understand what digital competences were needed by anyone who would like to work remotely or become an entrepreneur regardless of the activity field. Additionally the EntreComp (The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework) was taken into account for the entrepreneur profile. The results of this phase have provided as work basis to define both competences profiles focused on practical digital competences skills. Secondly, the project team has designed the accreditation pathways for both competence profiles based on Open Badges. They represent a valid indicator of specific competencies that can be earned in formal and informal learning environments. Furthermore, they can be used to motivate and influence engagement by providing for example focused goals or challenging tasks. Since, the project is also developing an e-assessment online platform implementing the assessment and accreditation tools, Open Badges are presented as a good complement. The e-assessment platform has been designed implementing the assessment modules presenting different digital challenges to the users to assess their levels in the 21 competences according to DigComp. The main benefit of using DigComp is that provides a common language and terminology, facilitating the design and development of the assessment modules providing to us clear criteria, well defined and easy to adapt to our necessities. Furthermore, DigComp is the most appropriate when talking about digital competence as a transversal component that is necessary for a wide variety of work profiles. Assessment and accreditation platform will be finished and piloted by February 2018.