OpenScout
OpenScout aims at accelerating the use, improvement and distribution of open content in the field of management education and training with a focus on SMEs and continuous training by providing skill-based search of content to large communities for learning – either in professional user communities (via integration with LMS systems) as well as to open web 2.0 communities (via integration to social network platforms).
| Project title | OpenScout – Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training |
| Project number | ECP 2008 EDU 428016 |
| Project coordinator | University of Jyvaskyla |
| Contact person | Jan M.Pawlowski, (jan.pawlowski@jyu.fi) |
| Contact person at VMU | Airina Volungevičienė, (airina.volungeviciene@vdu.lt) |
| Project run | September, 2009 – August, 2012 |
Partners:
- Open Universiteit Nederland (The Netherlands)
- The Open University (UK)
- SPK PLATO™ / PLATO Network (Belgium)
- IMC information multimedia communication AG (Germany)
- Giunti Interactive Labs S.r.l. (Italy)
- EFMD European Foundation for Management Development (Belgium)
- INSEAD (France)
- University of Sofia – Institute of Technology and Development (Bulgaria)
- Josef Stefan Institute – JSI (Slovenia)
- Vytautas Magnus University – VMU (Lithuania)
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover / L3S Research Center (LUH, Germany)
- Hypatia AS (Norway)
- Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Information Technology (FIT, Germany)
- ESCP-EAP Europäische Wirtschaftshochschule Berlin e.V. (ESCP-EAP)
- Brunel University – School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics (UK)
- UNED (Spain)
- National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos” (Greece)
Project goals:
The project covers the whole value-chain of user-generated and community-improved content: from skill-based search/retrieval to support of users to improve existing and generate new contents.
There is an ever growing need for management education and related content in all education segments and application fields. A large amount of open educational resources on management topics is already available, but this open content is significantly underused in the business sector, and particularly in SMEs where the need for lifelong learning is even greater. In contrast to other domains, user involvement in the field of education and training is still low. In many web communities, new contents and artefacts are developed, such as open source software. Even though there is a lot of initial material for learning and training purposes, only very few users work on localizing, improving or adapting those materials. Thus the target application of OpenScout is “continuous learning in management”, an ideal area to demonstrate the impact of our innovative approach to open content uptake, re-use and improvement, as well as its generalisability to other application areas and types of content.