Philipp Holtkamp

Skill-based scouting of open management content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources

Ha, K.-H., Niemann, K., Schwertel, U., Holtkamp, P., Pirkkalainen, H., Borner, D. et al (2011). A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources. In E. Garcia-Barriocanal, A. Ozturk, & M. C. Okur (Eds.), Metadata and Semantics Research: 5th International Conference MTSR 2011 (pp. 312-323), Izmir, Turkey, October 12-14, 2011. Springer.

How software development competences change in global settings-an explorative study

Global software development (GSD) holds various challenges and problems for team members. When confronted with a contextual change in their working environment, individuals have to adapt to the new situation. This includes the adaptation of working styles, behaviors, and methods. Additionally, new challenges, especially those based on the virtual work and cultural background of team members, have to be addressed. By conducting explorative expert interviews, we identified challenges and potential solutions for individuals when encountering contextual change with a focus on competences. We identified that the lack of competences was seen as a major influence factor for a variety of common challenges to GSD. The identification of underlying factors of challenges could allow for focused development of interventions to overcome these challenges. Furthermore, we identified factors influencing the adaptation of competences to the given context and provided insight into the process of competences adaptation. This is the basis for the future development of a set of internationalized GSD competences. Copyright

OpenScout: harvesting business and management learning objects from the web of data

Already existing open educational resources in the field of Business and Management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, it is difficult to act on OERs as some data is hidden. In the meanwhile, numerous repositories provide Linked Open Data on this field. Though, users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In this paper, we present the strategies to gather heterogeneous learning objects from the Web of Data, and we provide an overview of the benefits of the OpenScout platform. Despite the fact that not all data repositories strictly follow Linked Data principles, OpenScout addressed individual variations in order to harvest, align, and provide a single end-point. In the end, OpenScout provides a full-fledged environment that leverages on the Linked Open Data available on the Web and additionally exposes it in an homogeneous format.