Sustained learning is a crucial factor of an organisation's ability to survive and effectively compete in the globalisation era worldwide. Continually shrinking half-life periods of knowledge and fast changing globalised workplaces, force employees working in knowledge-intensive companies to acquire new knowledge and skills for life. The evolution of Web 2.0, the advantages and boom of New Media, the massive production of open educational resources and globalisation, are bringing revolutionary changes to all forms of education: formal, non-formal and informal. Thus, the need for continuing education and lifelong learning is obvious. Various surveys performed worldwide show that university graduates are not well prepared for today's working environment. Most important skills missing are related to the use of ICT and adoption of emerging technologies, teamwork/collaboration, creativity, innovation and change management, diversity and Leadership and fundamentals of enterpreneurship. Thus, there is also a need for education of newcomers. The purpose of this work is to examine the use of open educational resources in intra-organisational learning and to examine the properties of Learning Objects such as their metadata, that will facilitate this task. More precisely, this paper initially argues about the advantages of using open educational resources in eLearning and continuing education. Prerequisites for selecting and combining external Learning Objects will be examined. Ways for externalising the organisation's social capital in reusable Learning Objects appropriate for intra-organisational learning will be proposed. The issue of certification of informally acquired knowledge and skills will be mentioned. The use of open educational resources may enrich existing social capital and facilitate intra-organisational eLearning and continuing education in a cost-effective way. For better results, a formal characterisation scheme of LOs, in the form of a posteriori metadata, will greatly facilitate their organisation, search and retrieval process.

Keywords

social capital · Open Educational Resources · learning objects · continuing education · metadata · intra-organisational learning