MyPlan

MyPlan will develop, deploy and evaluate new techniques and tools that allow personalised planning of lifelong learning. The project will bring together stakeholders from a broad range of institutions all of whom are committed to providing lifelong learning opportunities which enhance career development and widen participation, including the recently announced Linking London Lifelong Learning Network (L4N), comprising over 25 institutions across London. These stakeholders will have input into the formulation of user and technical requirements and the evaluation of the tools developed by the project. MyPlan has three major aims:

• To develop and evaluate user models that reflect the needs of the diverse population of lifelong learners. To this end, we will identify learner attributes that need to be modelled and tasks/activities undertaken by lifelong learners, e.g. making career and educational choices, maintaining learning pathways throughout life, sharing information with peers and tutors. This user-related information will be used to design an ontology for user modelling in a lifelong learning context.
• To develop, deploy and evaluate personalised functionalities for the creation, searching and recommendation of learning pathways. This will enhance individual learners' engagement with the lifelong learning process by offering personalised levels of learner control over their learning pathways, personalised support in the reflection of where their learning activities may take them, and management of their personal record of progress and attainment. It will also support building communities of learners with similar interests, and information sharing with other members of the community, other users of the MyPlan system, and organisations.
• To evaluate current game-based applications for supporting lifelong learners with view to developing and integrating a game-based application into MyPlan.  This will allow learners to role-play different learning and career progressions in order to give them better understanding of the possible implications and consequences of different career decisions and educational choices.
  

The software tools developed by the project will be incrementally adopted by the Linking London Lifelong Learning Network (L4N), funded by HEFCE and will also be made available for access from within the UCAS web portal.