Rob Koper

Open University of the Netherlands | OU · University Chair at OU Board

In adult education there is a continuous, growing demand for learning opportunities that fit the specific characteristics and preferences of particular learner groups or individual learners. This requires educational institutions to rethink their business and educational models, and develop more flexible online course solutions using ICT. An import...

How do (potential) students differ in their preferences for the organization of online and distance courses and programs, can these differences be grouped into preference profiles, and are there any associations between these profiles and variables, such as achievement and dropout, that are relevant for the promotion and design of online and distan...

Smart learning environments (SLEs) are defined in this paper as physical environments that are enriched with digital, context-aware and adaptive devices, to promote better and faster learning. In order to identify the requirements for 'better and faster learning', the idea of Human Learning Interfaces (HLI) is presented, i.e. the set of learning re...

What is the most effective model for academic distance education, given that drop-out numbers in traditional distance education institutions are too high and the demands from the various stakeholders are changing? In this paper this question is answered from the perspective of the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL). The OUNL has planned to r...

In distance education teachers and students do not have classroom contact, but the education is mainly delivered through distance media. This dependency on technology makes these institutes extremely sensible for changes in technologies: from time to time fundamental shifts in the business model are needed in order to maintain the quality of their...

This book presents the current state of Open Educational Resources (OER) within the countries covered by the China's Belt and Road Initiative. The authors describe eight aspects of OER development in their countries: infrastructure, policy, resources, open license, curriculum and teaching methodology, outcome, stakeholders and impact. This book als...

Positioning in learning networks is a process that assists learners in finding a starting point and an efficient route through the network that will foster competence building. In the past we have explored computational approaches to positioning based on the contents of the learning network and the behaviour of those participating in it, more or le...

This chapter describes the architecture for an enterprise-level big data infrastructure at the Open University of the Netherlands. This infrastructure aims to capture dispersed data from various heterogeneous data sources into a single ledger of immutable data, which allow the development of the so-called ‘smart services’. Four major requirements f...

Background. The EMERGO method and online platform enable the development and delivery of scenario-based serious games that foster students to acquire professional competence. One of the main goals of the platform is to provide a user-friendly authoring environment for creating virtual environments where students can perform authentic tasks. Aim. We...

Since the publication of the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification in 2003, many initiatives have been undertaken to build authoring tools that are simple enough to be used by non-technical instructors and teachers. IMS LD’s technical complexity is believed to be a major burden for the adoption of the specification. We have developed a new app...

Realizamos una revisión sobre el estado de la cuestión en el tema de las comunidades virtuales, los grupos de trabajo y los proyectos de investigación centrados en la especificación de e-learning IMS Learning Design o desarrollados en torno a ella. Esta especificación se está convirtiendo de facto en el estándar más versátil y respaldado para model...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be regarded as a promising next step in the evolution of distance education. However, they have been criticised for their poor learning design. This article describes the development of an adequate learning design in a series of nineteen MOOCs (called online master classes). A formative evaluation focuses on...

This paper discusses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as a method for the assessment of prior learning. The Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) is a procedure to offer learners an individualized curriculum based on their prior experiences and knowledge. The placement decisions in this process are based on the analysis of student material by domain...

This explorative study identifies information elements that are commonly perceived as important to inform initial trustworthiness assessments of colleagues within virtual project teams. Collaboration in virtual project teams heavily relies on interpersonal trust, for which perceived trustworthiness is an important determinant. Knowing what informat...

Serious games are considered to provide powerful and attractive ways to acquire complex cognitive skills for education and training. But existing platforms for development of game-based e-learning often appear either not to be very user-friendly or too rigid or costly. This article addresses the design, development and evaluation of a generic platf...

In this paper we argue that a centrally governed Learning Management System (LMS) still has ample legitimacy in an information society that is ever more adopting cloud computing services in daily life. We argued that control over services and produced data is essential from the perspective of an educational institute for reasons of accountability,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an e-learning system that integrates the use of concepts of virtual learning environments, personal learning environments, and social network sites. The system is based on a learning model which comprises and integrates three learning contexts for the adult learner: the formal, instructional context...

Collaboration in virtual project teams heavily relies on interpersonal trust, for which perceived professional trustworthiness is an important determinant. In face to face teams colleagues form a first impression of each others trustworthiness based on signs and signals that are ‘naturally’ available. However, virtual project team members do not ha...

Rusman, E., Van Bruggen, J., Sloep, P. B., Valcke, M., & Koper, R. (2012). Can I Trust You? Profile Elements that Inform First Impressions of Trustworthiness in Virtual Project Teams. International Journal of Information Technology Project Management (IJITPM), 3(1), 15-35. DOI:10.4018/jitpm.2012010102

Specifications can be considered ‘hidden’ technology: they are deployed in tools and applications without being directly visible. This poses a challenge regarding quality assessment of this type of technology. This chapter describes a framework for quality assessment of learning technology specifications and how it was used to evaluate and improve...

This explorative study identifies information elements that are commonly perceived as important to inform initial trustworthiness assessments of colleagues within virtual project teams. Collaboration in virtual project teams heavily relies on interpersonal trust, for which perceived trustworthiness is an important determinant. Knowing what informat...

Van Bruggen, J., Koper, R., Kalz, M., Van Meeuwen, L., Berkhout, J., & Storm, J. (2011, 14 Oktober). Hoe breng je leven in een community? Masterclass in de OpenU community. Open universiteit, Heerlen, Nederland. Beschikbaar op http://portal.ou.nl/web/masterclass-communities

Sloep, P. B., Rajagopal, K., Fetter, S., Koper, R., Gijselaers, J., Kalz, M., Wolff, C., Brand-Gruwel, S., Berkhout, J., Storm, J., & Blankestein, H. (2012, 9 maart). Leren in en met netwerken. Masterclass in de OpenU community. Open universiteit, Heerlen, Nederland. Beschikbaar op http://portal.ou.nl/web/masterclass-netwerkleren/introductie/

Tot acht jaar geleden waren er in Nederland vrijwel geen hoogbegaafde leerlingen. Althans, dat werd gezegd in scholen voor primair en voortgezet onderwijs. Statistisch gezien echter was, en is, circa drie procent van hen hoogbegaafd. Incidenteel waren er wel schrijnende beschrijvingen van cognitief hoogbegaafde leerlingen en hun problemen in school...

Nederland wil zijn positie als kenniseconomie behouden en liefst versterken. Allerlei initiatieven zijn erop gericht dit te bewerkstelligen. Zo ook de nadruk op 'opbrengstgericht werken' waarbij individuele leerlingen en studenten zouden moeten worden begeleid om zo goed mogelijk te presteren. Op microniveau houdt dit in dat docenten of onderwijsma...

De laatste jaren wordt het steeds duidelijker dat het brein nog niet is uitgerijpt op 12-, 16- of 18-jarige leeftijd. De hersenontwikkeling gaat zeker nog door tot ver na het twintigste levensjaar. Ook is bekend dat schoolprestatie niet alleen bepaald wordt door datgene wat in de genen vastligt, maar dat omgevingsfactoren daar ook invloed op kunnen...

Westera, W., Koper, R., Kalz, M., Janssen, J., Bahreini, K., Storm, J., Berkhout, J., Heinen, M., & Vos, M. (2011, 4 november). Hoe gebruik je serious games in het onderwijs? Masterclass in de OpenU community. Open Universiteit, Heerlen, Nederland. Beschikbaar op http://portal.ou.nl/web/masterclass-serious-gaming/masterclass

Flexible lifelong learning requires that learners can compare and select learning paths that best meet individual needs, not just in terms of learning goals, but also in terms of planning, costs etc. To this end a learning path specification was developed, which enables to describe both the contents and the structure of any learning path, be it for...

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is therefore an application domain that generally covers technologies that support all forms of teaching and learning activities. Since information retrieval (in t...

Flexible lifelong learning requires that learners can compare and select learning paths that best meet individual needs, not just in terms of learning goals, but also in terms of planning, costs etc. To this end a learning path specification was developed, which describes both the contents and the structure of any learning path, be it formal, non-f...

This paper describes the needs analysis of tool for connecting people in a Learning Network using Group Concept Mapping method. We conducted an empirical study to identify the most relevant features of such a tool. There were 11 experts from 7 different countries with technical and non-technical background who participated in the study. Each of the...

In comparison with traditional assessment, emerging forms of assessment (e.g., self-/peer assessment and 360 degree assessment) involve multiple phases and multiple roles/persons, which are process-oriented assessment. IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) is an open technical specification for task-oriented assessment, which has insufficien...

Rusman, E., Van Bruggen, J., Sloep, P. B., Koper, R., & Valcke, M. (2011, 8 July). Trustworthy in the eye of the beholder? – A cognitive perspective on personal profile information in virtual project teams. Presentation at the 9th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Hong Kong, China.

Wil je iets weten? Geen probleem, dan google je toch even. Mensen zoeken bijna dagelijk informatie op internet. Voor het werk, voor school of privé. Maar vinden we wel de meest geschikte of juiste informatie? Is de informatie wel betrouwbaar en wat doen we met tegenstrijdige informatie? Met andere woorden: zijn we wel zo informatievaardig? Het effe...

This article reports on a qualitative study about the application of tag clouds for supporting meta-cognition in self-directed and incidental learning. Tag clouds are a popular and simple visualisation of the usage of free form keywords on the internet. The present study analyses the use of the ReScope system that provides a personal tag cloud visu...

During the last thirty years, developments in the new technologies have caused radical changes in the direction and conduct of industry and commerce, in service industries and education, and in society at large. High performance computing, PCs and notepads, and mobile technologies have enabled institutions and individuals to function more effective...

Several collaboration problems in virtual project teams that work in knowledge-intensive contexts can be attributed to a hampered process of interpersonal trust formation. Solutions to trust formation problems need to be based on an understanding of how interpersonal trust forms in face-to-face project teams as well as on insight into how this proc...

Mobile devices offer unique opportunities to deliver learning content in authentic learning situations. Apart from being able to play various kinds of rich multimedia content, they offer new ways of tailoring information to the learner’s situation or context. This paper presents the results of a study of mobile media delivery for language learning,...

IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is an open specification to support interoperability of advanced educational designs for a wide range of technology-enhanced learning solutions and other units of learning. This paper analyses approaches to model personalised learning experiences with and without explicit adaptive features in IMS LD. The paper has two m...

Personal information is an important precursor for the trust formation process in virtual project teams. However, till today it has remained unclear what specific personal information most trustors prefer. Insight in their preferences as well as in their foundation could support the development of templates that provide communication support to vir...

Following publications emphasizing the need of a taxonomy for instructional methods, this article presents a literature review on classifications for learning and teaching in order to identify possible classifications for instructional methods. Data was collected for 37 classifications capturing the origins, theoretical underpinnings, purposes and...

The paper proposes a conceptual model for designing a people-finding system in a Learning Network. The system is intended to help a learner in getting recommendation about suitable people who are interested on a similar topic and share common learning goal with the current learner. We propose that by using the user-generated (text) content, social-...

The following article presents a Mash-up Personal Learning Environment called ReMashed that recommends items from the emerging information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed users can specify certain Web 2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment. The users can rate information from an emerging amount of Web 2.0 inform...

Finding suitable ways to achieve particular learning goals is not an easy task, both in initial education and lifelong learning. To facilitate selection, personalisation and navigation of learning paths we propose to describe learning paths in a formal and uniform way by means of a learning path specification. This paper explains the rationale behi...

Web-based tagging systems for educational resources allow users to associate free keywords with learning resources. We first focus on the similarities and differences of tagging systems that are an integrated part of learning resources platforms, and then introduce a case study on teachers use of social tagging tools. We then analyse more than 20 0...

This software is open source and is distributed under the three clause BSD licence, Copyright TENCompetence Foundation.

This special issue is dedicated to new ways of self-organized learning and its technological support. More and more research in the field of technology-enhanced learning focuses not solely on learners within institutional settings but the topic of “crossing boundaries and contexts” has become something like a hidden agenda. This agenda is connected...

The implementation of double-loop-learning-based educational scenarios in instructional design in workflow-like e-learning systems appears to be showing a gap; whereas the former assumes that processes can be reflected upon and can be modified or amended by the learners, the latter only predefines a limited set of rigid instructional processes. How...

In this study an investigation using log-files of teachers’ Collections of educational resources in two different platforms was conducted. The goal was to find empirical evidence from the field that teachers use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue and originate from different countries than they do, fo...

Learning networks are favourable model for supporting self-directed learning for lifelong learners. Learners can decide about their learning plans to learn at their own pace irrespective of place and time. However, such learners remain hidden from others in the learning network, which makes their learning detrimental and less effective. Bringing le...

Automated competence tracking and management is crucial for an effective and efficient lifelong competence development in learning networks. In this paper, we systematically analyse the problem of unreliability of competence information in learning networks. In tracking the development of competences in learning networks, a large amount of competen...

This contribution introduces a placement web-service which has been developed in the context of the TENCompetence Integrated Project. The web-service uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to calculate similarity between documents in learner portfolios and content in the current learning network of the learner. In the first part of the paper the place...

This article argues for a new, user-driven process of developing a classification for teaching methods. First, a previous literature review is summarized that verified the need for a classification of teaching methods. Then, types of classifications are introduced with their characteristics and typical uses in regard to the maturity of knowledge do...

In this contribution we introduce SWeMoF, a semantic framework to discover patterns in learning networks and the blogosphere. Based on a description of the state of the art in data mining, text mining and blog mining we discuss the architecture of the Semantic Weblog Monitoring Framework (SWeMoF) and provide an outlook and an evaluation perspective...

The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Envi- ronment called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environ- ment. Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of...

This article describes the implementation and evaluation of a design pattern that fosters trust in mediated collaborative settings. The pattern proposed here should provide a profile with static and/or dynamic information about the participants of a collaborative environment. It aims to foster initial (in the first two to three weeks) trust in situ...

Purpose This paper deals with user‐generated interest indicators (ratings, bookmarks and tags). The authors aim to answer two research questions: Can search strategies based on social information retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users? Can Community search help users discover a wider variety of cross‐bound...

Efficient and effective lifelong learning requires that people can make informed decisions about their continuous personal development in the different stages of their life. In this paper we state that lifelong learners need to be characterized as decision-makers. In order to improve the quality of their decisions, we propose the development of an...

In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to study the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags on the one hand, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as the repos...

Special issue: Learning Design A learning design describes a sequence of learning activities that learners undertake in order to help them achieve particular learning objectives, including the resources and services needed to complete the activities. Unfortunately, there is no learning design language which can be used by teachers to describe pedag...

Contextualised and ubiquitous learning are relatively new research areas that combine the latest developments in ubiquitous and context aware computing with educational approaches in order to provide structure to more situated and context aware learning. The majority of recent activities in contextualised and ubiquitous learning focus on mobile sc...

The need to support users of the Internet with the selection of information is becoming more important. Learners in complex, self-organising Learning Networks have similar problems and need guidance to find and select most suitable learning activities, in order to attain their lifelong learning goals in the most efficient way. Several research ques...

In view of the professional development concept, learning can no longer be considered to be part of childhood and youth alone, but is becoming a lifelong achievement. Professional development no longer remains limited to the context of a regular school or university campus, but is becoming integrated into workplace learning and personal development...

For effective competence acquisition, professionals should have a clear overview of what learning actions (LAs) are relevant to them. LAs can use any type of learning resource or events (like a course, assignment, discussion, lesson, website, blog) that intends to help learners to acquire a certain competence when participating in a LN. Such learne...

In the TENCompetence project a set of UML models (Booch et al. 1999) have been developed to specify the core concepts for Learning Networks Services that support professional competence development. The three most important, high-level models are (a) the use case model, (b) the conceptual model, and (c) the domain model. The first model identifies...

The aim of this book, as described in the introduction, is to help people to further develop their professional competences during their careers by using the innovative powers of new media, mobile devices, and modern Internet services. This is related to the question of how to become and stay employable as a professional, given the permanently chan...

The purpose of a Learning Network is to provide opportunities for learning in a way that goes beyond course and curriculum centric models: they envision a learner-centred and learner controlled model of learning (Koper 2004). Lea et al. (2003) describe how studies into student perceptions and experiences of student-centred approaches tend to show f...

In this chapter we propose hybrid recommendation techniques for Personalised Recommendation Services (PRS) as a novel approach to set up individualised navigation in Learning Networks. Such an approach combines the collaborative filtering of information about others’ behaviour with matching information connected to individual learners and activitie...

Abstract. In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to study the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags on the one hand, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as...

The following article addresses open questions of the discussions in the first SIRTEL workshop at the EC-TEL conference 2007. It argues why personal recommender systems have to be adjusted to the specific characteristics of learning to support lifelong learners. Personal recommender systems strongly depend on the context or domain they operate in,...

Guest Editorial This special issue is dedicated to new ways of self-organized learning and its technological support. More and more research in the field of technology-enhanced learning focuses not solely on learners within institutional settings but the topic of “crossing boundaries and contexts” has become something like a hidden agenda. This age...

Glahn, C., Specht, M., & Koper, R. (2009). Perspective on Tag Clouds for Supporting Reflection in Self-organised Learning. In S. Fischer, E. Maehle & R. Reischuk (Eds.), Informatik 2009, Im Focus das Leben, LNI P-154 (p. 183, pp. 1672-1679). Bonn, Germany: Gesellschaft für Informatik.

This paper reports on a qualitative study about the application of tag clouds for supporting meta-cognition in self-directed and incidental learning. It analyses the use of a personal tag-cloud visualization of the tags that are used at a public social bookmarking service. The study focuses at the types of meta-cognitive control based on reflection...

Flexible lifelong learning requires tools that enable learners to compare and select those learning paths (i.e. a set of one or more learning actions) that best meet their needs in terms of learning goals, but also in terms of planning, costs etc. In order to support comparison and selection of learning paths, it is necessary to describe them in a...

This chapter describes a multi-platform extension of learning networks. In addition to Web- and desktop-based access, the authors propose to provide mobile, contextualised learning content delivery, and creation. The extension to a multi-platform extension is portrayed as follows. First, the authors give a description of learning networks, the kind...

This paper reports on a meta-analysis of two qualitative studies that use visualisations of user interactions in Web2.0 systems in order to support self-directed and incidental learning. This analysis focuses on the identification of design principles for supporting learning beyond the well structured conditions of educational institutions. The stu...