Rob Koper is professor and director of learning technologies research at the Open University of the Netherlands. The research group he chairs, consists of about 40 researchers. The group studies and develops models and technologies to support lifelong competence development. The research themes are:

• The creation, use and reuse of digital learning designs and learning resources
• Navigation in distributed networks of lifelong learners and learning resources
• Competence Assessment (positioning) in distributed learning networks for lifelong learners
• Ubiquitous access to lifelong learning networks
• Social interaction in communities of practice and learning communities
• Infrastructures and applications for the support of lifelong competence development

He publishes frequently in scholarly journals (see: dspace.ou.nl for an overview) and edited various books and special issues of journals in the field of learning design and lifelong competence development. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field and has (had) numerous roles in editorial boards, conference committees, management and advisory boards, etc. He was - among other things – responsible for the development of Educational Modelling Language (EML), currently an open standard through the IMS consortium (IMS Learning Design). One of his to co-ordinate the EU IST Integrated Project TENCompetence, a large multi million project that aims to develop an open source infrastructure to support lifelong competence development in Europe (see: www.tencompetence.org).