Collaborative learning to improve public services The role of public administrators is evolving, with staff expected to deliver improved services while also adapting to rapid social, legal and regulatory change. The Learn PAd project is developing an e-learning platform that will support collaborative knowledge-sharing, as project coordinator Antonia Bertolino explains The delivery of
public services is underpinned by extremely complex processes. Effective training is therefore essential to maintaining and indeed improving the quality of public services, an issue at the core of the Learn PAd project. “The aim of this project is to deliver an e-learning platform that is specifically targeted at employees of public administrations,” says Antonia Bertolino, the project coordinator. The wider objective is to offer staff the opportunity to train and update their skills on a continuous basis, which is essential considering the rapidly changing nature of public administration. “The rules and laws coming from central government change regularly,” points out Bertolino. “So on the one side citizens want more efficient services. On the other side there are public administrators, and they face a lot of constraints.”
Model-driven approach There is little scope at the moment for public administrators to take time off work to take a course, so training needs to fit alongside today’s working patterns. Staff in any job typically learn from each other in a collaborative way, so the Model-Based Social Learning for Public Administrations (LearnPad) @ProjectLearnPAd (https://twitter.com/ProjectLearnPAd/) http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=6661961 Project Coordinator: Antonia Bertolino, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche E: antonia.bertolino@isti.cnr.it W: http://www.learnpad.eu/ EU FP7-619583
Antonia Bertolino is a CNR Research Director in Pisa. Her research interests cover Software and Services Engineering, particularly validation and verification, on which she has published more than 150 papers. She serves in the editorial boards of the Journal of Systems and Software, ACM TOSEM and Empirical Software Engineering and is the General Chair of the Flagship Conference ICSE 2015.
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project is using a model-driven approach to develop a platform that supports both informative and procedural learning. “We are going to deliver a platform in which collaborative learning is done through a model-driven approach,” says Bertolino. The advantage of this modeldriven approach is that once the model is in place, automated transformation can be used for different views and users.
activity. Researchers are in close touch with public administrators to guide development of these demonstrators. “Procedural knowledge and related information will be represented in suitable models and related forms and textual descriptions. For instance, business process models will be used to outline the steps to be followed to serve a citizen’s request.” explains Bertolino.
The platform will allow people that have information about a specific issue or question to include this material in the platform. We are going to use the wiki-concept, developing an open-source, collaborative, web-based platform “When you make changes to the model, you don’t have to manually re-address it,” explains Bertolino. “So most things are achieved by automated transformation. This is a Software Engineering concept that we are exploiting in the project.” The focus is on integrating existing components into a platform specifically focused on the needs of collaborative learning. “The platform will allow people that have information about a specific issue or question to include this material in the platform. We are going to use the wikiconcept, developing an open-source, collaborative, web-based platform,” outlines Bertolino. During the lifetime of the project, the platform will be demonstrated on two application scenarios; budget reporting to the European Commission by an EU-funded research project (as Learn PAd), and the procedures mandated by regional administrations for setting up and organising a business
Collaborative learning This approach will allow staff with the necessary credentials to manage materials and content, and to edit and add content as required. Staff looking for guidance will be able to go into this web-based platform, and find the information they require, while Bertolino says the platform will also offer other opportunities for collaborative learning. “People will be able to jointly enter a training session, simulating the delivery of services to citizens, and they can collaborate during the simulated session. So they can send each other questions and exchange documents, as they really do while serving citizens,” she outlines. The project’s current focus is on developing the platform for public administrations, but Bertolino says it could potentially be used in other sectors as well. “We are targetting the public administration scenario, but the platform could also be used in the private sector in future,” she says.
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