Abstract:

In today’s society students and graduates are demanded to be equipped with two fundamental attitudes. The first is being active learners enrolled in all different activities related to Active Learning [1] that have place at academic space. The second demand is to keep their knowledge and skills up-to-date.

But continuously updating and learning is not just a student attitude. Nowadays, lifelong learning [2] and continuous training is the key to satisfy our changing professional needs. We believe that people need help from the higher education institutions in their lifelong learning process. Higher education institutions are very capable to manage an effective, trustworthy and accurate strategy for lifelong learning.
We must ensure that our education and training systems are able to provide students with new competences and skills for living standards in Europe: “The aim is for everyone to have the key set of competences needed for personal development, social inclusion, active citizenship and employment. These competences, apart from specific for each field of study, include more transversal skills such as digital competence, entrepreneurship competence, critical thinking, problem solving and learning to learn” [3].

All citizens have the right to high-quality and inclusive education, training and lifelong learning. Higher education institutions should support this right with high quality and accurate sources of information. Therefore, students should not only be self-updated making an online course from time to time; they must be continuously connected to the source of academic and scientific advances in their field of interest. We think this support can only be provided by higher education institutions. Higher education institutions should manage this process since they have the knowledge, the infrastructure and, more importantly, they have the ideal human resources to accomplish the process: teachers.

In this work we propose a framework in which the universities are more involved in the lifelong learning process of graduates. We currently have the technology needed to easily develop online platforms that could implement this new theory. It would also be interesting to incorporate knowledge from the business and industrial sector so experts from different fields can collaborate in a social network. We propose as a first experiment the development of a social collaborative content filter.

Students and graduates have access to a massive and overwhelming amount of information with no quality or classification filters that makes it unhelpful. Besides, the digital origins of most of this information makes many people without computer self-efficacy [4] unable to take advantage of it.

Our proposal will facilitate the collaborative supervision of the sources of information to ensure its quality and educational purpose by experts. Students and graduates will also actively participate in their learning process interacting with the proposed system.

Keywords:

lifelong learning, collaborative learning, social network, knowledge society.