Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > The Open University

The Open University (OU) is a unique organisation with a powerful mission. Through teaching, research and knowledge transfer, it promotes educational opportunity and social justice and transforms people’s lives.

The OU is the largest university in the UK, with more than 200,000 students. Most are part-time undergraduates but over 17,000 are postgraduates, including some 1,400 full-time and part-time research students.

The University supports a vibrant and innovative research and enterprise portfolio, fostering research teams who compete with the best in the world.

The OU plays a major role in European Framework Programme (FP) research projects across a wide range of disciplines. A few examples of such projects are detailed below:

European citizenship is a relatively new status that is separate from being a citizen of a particular EU member state. While there is a formal legal side, there is more to it than merely status and rights – there is a dynamic element, too. Citizens, third country nationals, refugees, illegal aliens and states all enact claims to European citizenship.

A major new research programme entitled “Enacting European Citizenship” (ENACT), is led by the Open University’s Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), and is funded by the EU Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (e1m).

ENACT is a consortium bringing together researchers from three original member states of the European Union (the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands), two new member states (Hungary and Latvia) and a candidate state (Turkey) to explore in-depth how European citizenship is claimed, disputed, built – in short, enacted.

The results of the three-year study will inform policy briefings for the European Parliament, the European Commission and other relevant groups.

xDELIA (Xcellence in Decision-making through Enhanced Learning in Immersive Applications) is a three-year FP7 research project in technology-enhanced learning delivered in partnership with the Open University Business School. Focusing on three groups, traders, private investors and ordinary members of the public, xDELIA will exploit new and emerging technologies to explore financial decision-making processes, including the role of emotion in people’s decisions.

Much financial training has, to date, focused purely on imparting knowledge and increasing people’s understanding. Whilst people may often have appropriate levels of knowledge, they are still ruled by their attitudes, habits, or emotional states. Investigating this, the project aims to develop new, technologically supported approaches to training and support for non-formal and informal learning in realworld settings to tackle the challenges faced by people and businesses when they make financial decisions.

The project employs cutting-edge gaming and sensor technologies. Game-based technologies are increasingly proven as a valid support for learning, particularly as they can place people in virtual situations. The xDELIA project will be employing these to analyse behavioural patterns and to support the non-formal and informal learning process.

The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute has been very successful in securing a variety of funding for innovative European research projects.

ROLE’s (Responsive Open Learning Environments) cross-disciplinary innovations will deliver and test prototypes of high responsive technology-enhanced learning environments, offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flexibility, user-control and mass-individualisation.

The work of ROLE will advance the state of the art in human resource management; self-regulated and social learning; psychopedagogical theories of adaptive education and educational psychology; service composition and orchestration; and the use of ICT in lifelong learning.

ROLE offers personalisation in terms of content, navigation and the entire learning environment. Elements can be mashed up to generate new components and functionalities, which can be adapted by individual or collaborating learners to meet their specific needs. Users are thus empowered to establish a livelier and personally more meaningful learning context and experience.

ROLE’s generic framework uses an open source approach, interoperable across software systems and technologies.

Computer science is entering a new generation. The emerging generation starts by abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). In a world of services, it is the service that counts for a customer and not the software or hardware components which implement the service. Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. A service web will have billions of services. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionse the world of computing by abstracting from the underlying hardware and software layers, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges that SOA does not address today.

SOA4All (Service orientated architecture for all) will help to realise a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced web technology. It will provide a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complementary and revolutionary technical advances comprising of underlying web principles, semantic web technology, context management and Web 2.0 into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform.

SOA4All will contribute significantly to the NESSI Open Framework, which is one of the main challenges of the European Platform on Software and Services. In a broader context SOA4All will be a major contributor to the definition of the Future Internet of 2015, an initiative of the European Union that aims to define the future of the Internet from the physical infrastructure to user applications.

The Open University Faculty of Social Sciences has been awarded e1.49 million to coordinate FINNOV – a new research project aimed at understanding the sources, implications and management of positive and negative changes in financial markets. The research findings will be used to inform financial policy and innovation policy at the national and transnational level.

The three-year FP7 project is funded under the topic “The role of finance in growth, employment and competitiveness in Europe”. The project will examine the link between the financial sector and the real economy (eg innovation, investment and growth), asking challenging questions such as whether the sector has facilitated or impeded industrial innovation? The Open University will coordinate a consortium of seven institutions from across Europe.

FINNOV will study how links across the economy influence economic growth, examining the experience of individuals, businesses and the wider economy. The challenge is to understand the complex role of finance in the dynamics of the real economy and investigate how differences (such as those in shareholder attitudes) between the institutions and the economic participants involved (eg investors, shareholders and consumers) govern this relationship.

ASSYST (Action for the Science of complex Systems for Socially intelligent iCT), a project coordinated by members of the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, aims to promote the science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT and complex systems science in Europe and worldwide.

The project is looking to promote complex systems scientific interchange in Europe and worldwide, to create strong links between complex systems science and the private sector as well as the public sector and to develop high-quality web-based information services and tools.

The project is funded from the e20m FET Proactive initiative Science of Complex Systems for Socially Intelligent ICT (COSI-ICT). The COSIICT programme has four integrated projects with e900,000 for ASSYST. The work packages of ASSYST are closely aligned with the activities of the Complex Systems Society.

Dr Alison Hardy,
Innovation and Enterprise Manager,
Research School
Innovation and Enterprise,
Rm 140, South West Building,
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
E-mail: a.hardy@open.ac.uk
Website: www.open.ac.uk/research/