Integrating Research in Professional Learning

In the year 2000 United States’ enterprises already invested 20 percent of their budget (13 Billion US-$ out of 66 Billion US-$) for professional education in eLearning activities [Corp00]. A similar trend is now becoming apparent for Europe as well. According to research by the Gartner Group, the European market of corporate eLearning had a capacity of 829 million $ in 2001, and was supposed to grow to 7.4 billion $ by the year 2004 [Scie01]. Despite these impressive figures, it has repeatedly been reported that the actual impact of research and development (R&D) on learning technologies remains limited so far, indicating that too few R&D results are picked up in actual practice. One of the reasons for this is that technology enhanced learning (TEL) research and researchers are scattered across quite a few distinct communities, with often very limited awareness of the ”outer world”. To counteract against these effects in a positive way and to strengthen European position in the field of professional TEL, new research instruments, like Networks of Excellence, were set up by the European Commission. The EU/IST FP 6 project PROLEARN is such a network of excellence (NoE) that strives to integrate the research in those various communities and will be described within this article. It is one of the flagship projects in the field of TEL that will be bundled by the recently introduced professional learning cluster (PRO-LC), that strives for sustaining ongoing research efforts, tapping synergies and broaden their impacts in academia and industry. As a result of the integration and the definition of new research questions motivated by the PROLEARN partners the EU/IST funded Integrated Project PROLIX will be taken as an example. This IP which is also part of the PRO-LC-cluster deals with one of the issues identified in PROLEARN, namely the tight coupling of business and learning processes on the base of competency modelling that further develops the future research as well as the further development of the European research agenda in the field of TEL.