Projects

A.) Selected Research and Development projects

2009 – 2012: OpenScout (http://www.openscout.net/)

OpenScout stands for “Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training”. OpenScout is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus Programme as a Targeted Project in the area of Educational Content (Grant ECP 2008 EDU 428016). OpenScout started in September 2009 and has a duration of three years. OpenScout aims at providing an education service in the internet that enables users to easily find, access, use and exchange open content for management education and training.

The management education market is largely diversified, training topics range from general management and leadership to very specific issues like managing risks in banking industry. Despite the resulting growing need for management education and content the potential of already existing open learning materials is hardly exploited, neither in the business sector nor in SMEs where the need for lifelong learning is even greater. To reduce the usage barriers OpenScout offers easy-to-use skill-based federated search and retrieval web services, provides an openly accessible tool library for improvement and re-publishing of open contents and establishes an open user community that opens up their content and adopts OpenScout web services in real contexts of use. OpenScout can be used by learners directly but also by training and education institutions that search for learning content to be integrated into their learning offerings. I am leading the work package on ‘competence services’ in the project.

2009/2010: UHI Service Evaluation

In this project the service portfolio of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is evaluated. A combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches identifies critical improvement aspects and contributes to a future service strategy of UHI. Read more here.

2008/2009: Semantic Weblog Monitoring Framework (http://swemof.sf.net)

Requirements, project planning and support of the development of a semantic framework that can make use of sources from the social web to conduct text and data analysis and apply classical approaches from text and data mining. The prototype has been published under an Open Source License.

2007-2009: TENCompetence (http://www.tencompetence.org/web/guest)

In the Integrated European project TENCompetence a web service prototype has been developed to approximate knowledge encapsulated in eportfolios of learners. The service is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and has been evaluated in different contexts.

2006: Bildungstechnologie.net

Implementation of a Content-Community-Collaboration System for the german speaking e-learning community. Within 6 months a community platform has been implemented and under involvement of the community members further structured.

2005: cNews – Campus Information System (http://c-news.sourceforge.net/)

In this project a campus information system has been developed on the basis of RSS technology. The service allowed the personalized integration of a news feed into university websites and portal pages. The system is fully based on PhP/MySQL and has been published under an OpenSource license. The project has been developed in cooperation with the Evaco GmbH in Duisburg.

2003/2004: KOSFO (http://www.die-bonn.de/forschungslandkarte.info/projekt_details.aspx?pro_id=88)

In this project with the German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning the awareness and use of different learning technologies within the german trainer community has been analyzed. On the basis of several technology acceptance theories an explorative study has been conducted. I was responsible for a survey that focused on the acceptance of several new social software technologies (Weblogs, Wikis etc.) in the target community.

B.) Participation in national and international research consortia (selected successful project proposals)

OpenScout: Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training (Targeted Project under the eContentplus programme funded from September 2009 – October 2012)

OpenScout stands for “Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training”. OpenScout is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus Programme as a Targeted Project in the area of Educational Content (Grant ECP 2008 EDU 428016). OpenScout started in September 2009 and has a duration of three years. OpenScout aims at providing an education service in the internet that enables users to easily find, access, use and exchange open content for management education and training.

LTfLL: Language Technology for Lifelong Learning (STREP funded by the European Comission under the FP7 programme with the focus on digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning from January 2008 -  February 2011) http://www.ltfll-project.org/

The LTfLL (Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning) project will create next-generation support and advice services to enhance individual and collaborative building of competences and knowledge creation in educational and organizational settings. The project makes extensive use of language technologies and cognitive models in the services. The research activities are enveloped by activities that ensure common ground in use cases and pedagogically sound scenarios that steer the design and development of the services and guide the validation; a technical infrastructure for the creation and integration of the services and a validation structure that ensures rigorous evaluation in realistic settings, with several languages supported.

OLCOS: Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (Transversal Action funded by the European Comission under the eLearning programme between January 2006 – December 2007) http://www.olcos.org

OLCOS, the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services project (1/2006-12/2007) is co-funded under the European Union’s eLearning Programme and aims at building an (online) information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of open educational resources, in particular, open digital educational content (ODEC) in Europe.

Presently the benefits and characteristics of open source software in education is apparent and widely acknowledged, this is not the case with respect to the concept of digital open content that may particularly benefit flexible and open learning models (e.g. collaborative knowledge and skills building) in schools, higher educational institutions and vocational training.

CampusContent: DFG Centre for Excellence for E-Learning (funded by the German Science Foundation between March 2005 and july 2009 http://www.campuscontent.de)

DFG Center of Excellence for E-Learning, has developed methods, tutorials and technologies for creating, reusing and exchanging learning and knowledge objects.  The centre promotes the formation and co-operation of communities of practice that create learning content.