Professor Mike Osborne and Dr Muir Houston of PASCAL and CR&DALL are involved in a new project funded under the Erasmus Multilateral funding stream which builds on the work of the THEMP project.

The project aims to study the Tertiary Lifelong Learning (TLL) strategies of higher education institutes to improve the quality of work of the learners and the quality of their work performance. The project provides a comparative study of the potential of universities’ TLL in both these dimensions and of the possibilities, but also the obstacles to develop this potential. The project will analysis the efficiency of TLL programs with a specific focus on the possibilities for the integration of non-traditional learners in the higher education systems under examination.

Based on a classification of institutional strategies, the project will analyse apparent good practice in selected universities in six European countries addressing: the regulation of the TLL sector within the national qualification systems, but also the integration and /or collaboration of labour market actors in programme design. The project focuses attention on the internal regulation in terms of access, learning pathways, certifications, recognition of prior learning, funding; and the relation to the Bologna three-cycle system and the ECTS.

These results will allow to the project team to develop differentiated tools for the analysis of the impact of the TLL programs on the quality of work and the quality of work performance; and, for the measurement of the return of investment in terms of financial, human, cultural and social capital.

The project will facilitate mutual learning so that the internal and external stakeholders of  university TLL can exchange experience, contrast the findings of the good practice analyses; and design strategies to improve the labour market linkages. At an end-of-project conference, the project findings will be presented. A project website will be developed to present ongoing and emergent findings in the course of the project targeting policy makers, rectors and directors of higher education institutes, practitioners and students. A dissemination and exploitation strategy will be developed and applied based on the principle of networking with other initiatives and projects as well as with experts in the field.

An initial meeting of the project partners will take place in Barcelona, Spain on the 16^th of December 2013.

The project partners are:

Universitat Rovira i Virgili: Tarragona, Spain

Fundación Conocimiento y Desarrollo (CYD): Barcelona, Spain

University of Glasgow: Glasgow, UK

Universität Bremen: Bremen, Germany

Navreme Boheme, s. r. o.: Prague, Czech Republic

Anadolu Üniversitesi: Eskisehir, Turkey

University of Tampere: Tampere, Finland.

Ref: 539382-LLP-1-2013-1-ES-ERASMUS-EQR