IWWB-PLUS: InfoWebWeiterbildung: Personalised search area for the learning environment

The IWWB-PLUS project is supported by the INVITE funding program of the Federal Ministry of Education and Re-search and contributes to strengthening further education in Germany. It focuses on the aim of enhancing the appeal and usability of the established continuing education search platform InfoWebWeiterbildung (IWWB). Innovative technology will be implemented in this regard, as well as enabling interoperability with other services in the area of continuing education.

In this age of rapid and continual change in life and work, continuing education is more important than ever. Individuals are often faced with the challenge of finding the continuing education course that suits their needs. InfoWebWeiterbildung (IWWB) is a web-based meta search engine that has for many years supported individuals in finding suitable courses. IWWB-PLUS implements new web and information technology to concentrate on an improvement and functional expansion of the existing platform.

The following main objectives are pursued:

  • Chatbots: Implementation of dialogue technologies to support users in finding appropriate continuing education offers
  • Light Assessments: Development and integration of appropriate procedures to assess the current state of knowledge in people with an interest in continuing education, to find matching continuing education offers.
  • Interoperability with external information providers (Europass): linkage to the EUROPASS system to personalise users' lists of search results 

A further important goal of IWWB-PLUS is the re-engineering of UX design in order to significantly improve the user experience through an optimized human-machine interface.

IWWB-PLUS is divided into an analysis and planning phase. This is followed by the development and implementation of dialog technologies and light assessments as well as the connection and targeted data exchange with Europass. The UX design is re-engineered in parallel. The iterative planning and development cycles are accompanied by educational research and supported by the results of this research. Regular user and provider surveys (online) are conducted, the IWWB metadata is analyzed and expert interviews and focus groups are held. The research questions focus on the supply and demand structures in the IWWB, on specific professional requirements for the implementations and on user and provider requirements for the functional design of the implementations. The evaluation of the implementations and the analysis of possible applications in other usage contexts round off the project.

IWWB-PLUS contributes to the personalized search for suitable training opportunities on the underlying IWWB platform through the implementation of intelligent chatbots for user guidance as well as well-founded light assessments and the connection to Europass as a European tool for identifying and presenting learning and career opportunities. An evidence-based UX design also significantly improves user orientation.

Check the IWWB-PLUS Trailer


Funding: DIPF

Co-operation: German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz-Centre for Lifelong Learning (DIE) 

Duration: 09/2021 - 08/2024

Status: ongoing

Project team: Daniel Schiffner, Sylvia Kullmann, Atezaz Ahmad, Axel Gehlen

Contact: Daniel Schiffner