R&D

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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 –in professional user communities (via integration with LMS systems) as well as to open web 2.0 communities (via integration to social network platforms).

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 content.

OpenScout’s wide and large scale educational service will consist of the following components:

• Web Services Infrastructure. To enhance access to open content, OpenScout provides end users with federated, skill-based search and retrieval web services that can be integrated into existing LCMS systems as well as social network platforms.
• Federated Content Base. To make accessible content of different types from many disciplines of management science, OpenScout inter-connects a large pool of different open content repositories to form a federated content base on which OpenScout’s web services operate.
• Tool Library. To facilitate (re-)use and improvement of open content in real-world educational scenarios, OpenScout provides a set of integrated tools and support mechanisms that enable users to modify, adapt and localize materials to meet their needs and context.
• Open User Community. To achieve large scale adoption in real contexts of use, OpenScout establishes an Open User Community (with a focus on content providers and users) that open up their content to Web Services, contribute metadata (such as skill-data, user evaluations, ratings, etc.) and furthermore support design and evaluation of OpenScout’s prototypes.

For more information about OpenScout: www.openscout.net