Open University (OU, UK)

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The Open University (OU) has students in 180 countries, including over 100,000 students in the European Economic Area (EEA) and in Member States across Europe. These are enrolled on approximately 250 courses, mainly in English. Partner institutions in other member states, such as the Paris Chamber of Commerce, have translated some of its courses and offer them to citizens in those countries.

It is a world-class institution and leading supporter of the information society, as well as one of the earliest users of ICT in education (since the early 1970s). Since that time, it has created an enormous collection of ICT-based teaching material and associated assessment material (much of which is computer-marked), plus other media such as television and radio programmes. That material is of the highest quality and is used by many institutions. The OU is exploring, through projects such as this, ways of using open standards and interoperability to increase the accessibility of items in that collection and to make it easier for it and its partners to modify those items and find new applications for them.

Research Activities
The OU houses some top-ranked research units concerned with the information society and information technologies, including the Knowledge Media Institute, the Institute of Educational Technology, the UK's national centre for Educational Quality Assurance and the UNESCO-funded International Centre for Distance Learning (the global clearing house for information about courses world-wide using open learning). It has coordinated or participated in a large number of European RTD projects, including about 20 in the IST programme and related programmes.

At the OU, the project will have participation from staff of the UserLab at the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), including four key members: Drs Pascale Hardy, Paul Lefrere, Patrick McAndrew and Josie Taylor. They share interests in the re-usability of learning objects and in the new working methods, socio-technical systems and brokerage systems that are needed to enable institutions to make effective use of such objects. They will consult with, and involve as appropriate, colleagues from across the University. These will include the Requirements research group from the Computing Department, which has considerable experience of requirements in mobile computing.

Key people: Dr. Paul Lefrere, Dr. Pascale Hardy, Dr David Morse, Professor Bashar Nuseibeh

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