Oplà, a tool for helping teachers with problem-based learning and competence-based education

Competence-based education (CBE) has been advocated by the European Commission long ago, and most EU states promulgated laws to introduce it into schools, albeit not always with a clear success, due to the difficulty given by the required paradigm shift for the teachers. After running a three years project aimed at defining a methodology and a technological support system for competence-based learning in high schools [1], we learned many lessons about the hurdles encountered in the Italian School system. Taking these into account, we shifted our focus to vocational education, and developed a new system called OPLA that marries CBE with Problem-based learning. In this paper we will briefly recap the lesson learned in the first project, the ideas which brought us to the focus shift, and the main characteristics of OPLA.