Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems

EAGLE

EnhAnced Government LEarning

View of the main square from town hall tower in Rothenburg ob der Tauber
© istock / Zach Zimet

Public administrations need to cope with various challenges: new regulations, an aging workforce and the need for adopting ICT. Thus, technology-enhanced learning represents a sensible option notably for rural local governments that need to keep up with such changing environments, but have limited access to training courses.

Interviews in a pre-study with rural local governments in five European countries (namely Luxembourg, Montenegro, Germany, Austria and Ireland) have shown that

  • often the biggest obstacle is to include learning in the work process,
  • training plans are missing and
  • motivation to spend working time on learning is often low for different reasons.

Despite regular use of computer and mobile devices, there are deficiencies in communication and collaboration skills of people working in public administrations that also need to be improved in an enhanced government learning environment.

Objectives
EAGLE aims at equipping employees in local government administration in rural communities with a holistic training solution that supports learning of critical transversal skills such as ICT literacy, information literacy and professional management of change situations in entire organizations at all levels. To achieve this, EAGLE creates a novel yet flexible and cost-effective open learning platform adapted for rural local governments with the purpose of:

  • Developing automatic question item generation for online assessments based on open educational resources (OER)
  • Developing a proficiency-based curriculum for enabling and learning with OER and OER tools, including rapid development tools.
  • Creating an open learning platform connecting to existing learning platforms and local government information systems, harnessing the powers of open data as well as OER
  • Enhancing the open learning platform with public administration specific user services like argumentation technology and general learner support through automatic question item generation from OER and easy access to OER tools.
  • Analyzing cultural differences and commonalities to support exchange of knowledge and to foster a cross-European OER local government learning community.
EAGLE project Services Overview
© EAGLE

Technologies and Components
Scientists of Fraunhofer FOKUS are leading and developing – in synchronization with other partners – the EAGLE Learning Platform as a model-driven, modular and distributed open learning platform for employees in the public administration or civil services.

Impact
EAGLE will significantly advance the state-of-the-art in public administration learning and introduce the technology through our validation and associated partners in real-life rural local government environments. More particularly, this project will:

  • Stimulate the take-up of learning technologies in local government;
  • Reinforce the evidence-based assessment of learning technologies' effectiveness;
  • Encourage the innovative use of learning technologies;
  • Allow employees in public administrations to acquire skills more timely and effectively;
  • Increase awareness on the benefits of the adoption of learning technologies.

Funded by

Logo Seventh Framework Programme