The TENCompetence project will support individuals, groups, and organisations that are active in the field of lifelong competence development by establishing the most appropriate technical and organizational infrastructure. This infrastructure will make use of open-source, standards-based, sustainable, and innovative technology. Large-scale use in Europe will be stimulated by building a network of users and parties that can offer commercial services on the network. The project will develop models and methods for working with the infrastructure and will train instructors and agents in working with the infrastructure and the models. The project includes a number of substantial pilot studies to test the infrastructure in different sectors.

Integration


The technical infrastructure will integrate a number of software components that were developed by the project partners in an earlier stage. Furthermore, new tools and methods will be developed. Project leader Rob Koper of the Educational Technology Expertise Centre (OTEC): "The programmes that are currently available are very diverse in nature. They support one or a few educational or learning activities, but there is no connection between these programmes.

At this moment there is no single open source solution that supports all aspects of lifelong learning, so we are going to integrate the existing open source software into one single infrastructure. We will also develop new programmes to complete or to replace existing programmes that are not suitable for this specific infrastructure."

Moreover, in order to promote different aspects of lifelong learning, methodologies will be developed and described. On top of that, the project will develop three new specifications for standardisation.


The TENCompetence infrastructure will support formal as well as informal learning, the learning of individuals as well as of groups and organisations. It can be used at all levels of learning: primary, secondary, and tertiary education, adult and company training and other informal learning. The infrastructure includes facilities for sharing knowledge, course and curriculum development (based on IMS learning design), supporting learning route selection, supporting assessment, exchanging portfolio information, supporting knowledge and learning communities, etc. Pilot studies will be held in the field of education of health workers, competence development in water management, and in city-wide contexts.

The Open Universiteit Nederland


The Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL) is a state university for higher distance education. By law it was delegated the task to innovate in the area of higher education. For over twenty years, the Educational Technology Expertise Centre (OTEC) has fulfilled this task by conducting research, developing learning technologies and specifications, and by implementing these new techniques and insights in the OUNL courses and programmes. The internationally recognised specification for educational design, IMS learning design, was developed by the Educational Technology Expertise Centre. Furthermore, the Educational Technology Expertise Centre is a well known international resource of expertise in the field of open source software for education.