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The Users' Group aims at enhancing dialogue and mutual understanding between the world of research represented by KAL members and the world of users — as defined below — and making decision-makers aware of potential negotiation pathways

In the context of the Users’ Group, the world of users is defined by practitioners in the education and training field, be they involved as parents in the context of the Home market, involved as part of the teaching profession or as learners in whatever context, or involved as human resources managers at Company level, Initial or Higher education levels.

Most of the research on users’ needs analyses is based on formal surveys that only consider the performance expected from technology use and pay poor attention to users' attitudes, motivation, behaviour and ethos that actually deeply contribute to shape users' acceptance of TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) and develop their social uses in the users' context of action. The Users Group will pay attention to these “missing aspects” by conducting the following main activities:

1. developing methods for extracting users’ requirements and expectations to enable them to specify their needs on the basis of their contexts of action and the values that govern their choices;
2. developing methods for extracting researchers’ implicit perceptions of users’ needs and the values that steer their visions of their research priorities;
3. developing tools enabling KALEIDOSCOPE researchers to investigate and take into account Users’ concerns in their TEL research.
4. developing awareness among users, researchers and decision makers through making the outputs and results of the Users’ Group available and usable for different audiences. In this context, the Users' Group addresses the issue of public awareness outside Kaleidoscope: this task aims at linking Kaleidoscope to Actors that are representatives of Adult Training, Higher Education , Initial education and Informal Learning on the European and international scene. Inside Kaleidoscope, the Users’ Group is to be understood as an internal support service to other KJAs (SIGs, JEIRPs, ERTs, VDS, SVL, AIDA, ATI).

Expected results for the activity are the setting up of a new conceptual framework on the issues of users' requirements to be shared both by users and researchers through their structured confrontation (documented and prepared workshops), and contributing to align research and users' agendas, as well as being a tool to guide decision-makers by making explicit their political nature - "political" in the sense that they call for a negotiation process.