Projects

PROLEARN - Network of Excellence in Professional Learning

Since September 2006, I am the general manager of the PROLEARN Network of Excellence. This NoE connects the main players in the field of research on professional learning within Europe.

PROLEARN is a 'Network of Excellence' program of the European Commission dealing with technology enhanced professional learning. Our mission is to bring together the most important research groups in the area of professional learning and training, as well as other key organisations and industrial partners, thus bridging the currently existing gap between research and education at universities and similar organisations and training and continuous education that is provided for and within companies.

More information at the PROLEARN Website.

TENCompetence

TENCompetence is funded by the European Commission through the IST Programme. It is developing and using infrastructure to support individuals, groups and organisations in lifelong competence development.

Within TENCompetence, I am the leader of work package 7, Competence Developement Programs. Within this work package, we aim to develop graphical tools and personalization mechanisms that allow lifelong learners to select and plan their learning activities in a way that is intuitive, efficient and fun at the same time.

More information at the TENCompetence Website.

GRAPPLE

GRAPPLE is a project in the FP7 Call of the EC that is yet to start (kick-off meeting in February 2008). I am looking forward to working in this project, in particular as it will allow me to focus more on user adaptivity and personalization (my expertise areas), rather than with e-learning per se. Below you find an abstract of the project, grabbed from the project plan.

The GRAPPLE project aims at delivering to learners a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environment that guides them through a life-long learning experience, automatically adapting to personal preferences, prior knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the personal or social context in which the learning takes place. The same TEL environment can be used/accessed at home, school, work or on the move (using mobile/handheld devices). GRAPPLE will include authoring tools that enable educators to provide adaptive learning material to the learners, including adaptive interactive components (visualizations, simulations, virtual reality). Authoring includes creating or importing content, assigning or extracting meaning from that content, designing learning activities and defining pedagogical properties of and adaptation strategies for the content and activities. To ensure the wide adoption of adaptation in TEL GRAPPLE will work with Open Source and commercial learning management system (LMS) developers to incorporate the generic GRAPPLE functionality in LMSs. Evaluation experiments in higher education and in industry will be performed to verify the usability of the GRAPPLE environment (for authoring and delivery) and to verify the benefits of using adaptive TEL for the learning outcome. Apart from stimulating the use of adaptive TEL by making it available to every organization using a (popular) LMS the GRAPPLE consortium will also organize training/evaluation events to help higher education institutes and companies with the adaptive learning design needed to create adaptive learning material, and to receive usability feedback which the project will use to improve the user interfaces. A distributed user modeling service architecture will help end-users to stay in control of their user profile while at the same time allowing them to use the profile to get personalized access to learning applications offered through different LMSs by different organizations.

More information at the GRAPPLE Website