Project development and management

Project development and management services are provided to commercial and public sector organisations participating in RTD programmes funded by national governments and the European Commission. Services range from critical appraisal of clients' own project ideas and identification of potential project partners through to full-scale development of a complete project, strategic project management, and consultancy aimed at developing long-term research agendas for organisations.

Since 1998, we have helped clients secure over €12 million of funding from the European Commission for new project activities. Recent projects developed for European Schoolnet, ( http://www.eun.org ) one of our regular clients, include:

CELEBRATE
In 2001, we helped the EUN to develop and manage the 30-month, CELEBRATE demonstration project (http://celebrate.eun.org ). With almost €5 million funding from the European Commission's IST Programme, CELEBRATE developed over 1400 Learning Objects and evaluated the impact that this new form of content is having on the learning process in Europe's schools. Addressing all parts of the educational content value chain, this strategic, large-scale project involved 23 participants including Ministries of Education, universities, leading educational publishers, content developers, VLE vendors and technology suppliers from 11 countries.

eCOLOURS
In 2004, the follow-on eCOLOURS feasibility project ( http://ecolours.eun.org ) was  developed for the EUN with funding from the Commission's eContent Programme. This project helped Ministries of Education and commercial publishers identify roadblocks to co-operative working and to develop new strategies for the co-development and localisation of learning resources.

CALIBRATE
In 2005, we helped the EUN to develop the 30-month, CALIBRATE project (http://calibrate.eun.org ) which will make it easier for large educational content repositories to offer a federated search capability. Launched in October 2005, the 30-month project brings together eight Ministries of Education, including six MoEs from new member states. With funding of approximately €3.4 million from the IST Programme, CALIBRATE will further develop and implement an open source version of the CELEBRATE brokerage system architecture as the basis for a new European Learning Resource Exchange. As well as extending the EUN work related to brokerage system architectures, CALIBRATE will also look at new ways to improve the semantic interoperability of learning resource descriptions by researching and validating techniques for successful mapping or association of national curricular. During the project, work will also be carried out related to the development of a next-generation, open source ‘learning toolbox’.

MELT
Starting in September 2006, the MELT project involves 18 educational content providers, including 12 Ministries of Education. With approximately €3 million in funding from the European Commission’s eContentplus programme, this 27-month project will bring together a critical mass of existing educational materials that will then be enriched with semantically well-defined metadata. We helped the EUN to develop this project in order to enable European MoEs to provide scalable solutions for volume metadata creation. MELT will particularly explore new approaches to metadata creation involving ‘folksonomies’ and ‘social tagging’ and the implementation of automatic metadata generation frameworks.

As well as helping to develop and manage the above projects, we have enabled the EUN to develop a long-term strategy related to the development and delivery of educational content. For example, we are currently working with the EUN to launch a new pan-European Learning Resource Exchange ( http://lre.eun.org ) for schools as a key part of this strategy.