Jožef Stefan Institute

Jožef Stefan Institute is the biggest research organisation in Slovenia for pure and applied research in the natural sciences and technology. At present the Institute, totalling about 950, has a research staff of about 700. In view of its activities and status, JSI plays a role of a kind of national institute, complementing the role of universities and bridging the gap between science and applications/industry. In 2004, JSI also established an international postgraduate school. The Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks, one of JSI’s departments, has rich experience in research and development on technology enhanced learning, usability testing and evaluation of learning technologies, information security, data protection and privacy, and internet technologies and services. Large part of those activities was performed in the EU FP, eContentplus and Leonardo da Vinci funded projects.

Within SELPRAF, we are currently creating learning services to encourage people for entrepreneurship and self-employment, and enable the inclusion of the unemployed in practice firms. Competency-based education was investigated in the ICOPER project, while in OpenScout we have successfully connected together different sources of open content for management education and training. In the ELENA project, a smart space for learning that integrated heterogeneous learning services and provided a learner personalised view on a large collection of learning resources was created. The iCamp project investigated innovative learning processes for higher education and created an iCamp Space based on social software and personal learning environments. Privacy aspects of personalized adaptive learning systems were for example investigated in the PROLEARN network of excellence in professional learning, while a brokerage platform for exchange of learning resources was built in the UNIVERSAL project. A number of learning services and portals have also been developed for vocational education and training of the teachers/trainers and unemployed people, for example in the projects such as iDotik, e4VET, and Merlab.

JSI has many experiences with dissemination of the results of the projects it participated in, and organisation of training events. JSI also has good collaboration with academic institutions, public administration and service organisations in Slovenia. Members of public administration, e.g. Slovenian PES, are taking e-learning courses on innovative e-learning technologies and organisational learning facilitated by the members of the laboratory.

Key persons

Organization:  Jožef Stefan Institute

Dr. Tomaž Klobučar is a researcher at Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks at Jožef Stefan Institute and an assistant professor at Jožef Stefan Postgraduate School and DOBA Faculty of Applied Business and Social Studies. His main interests are technology enhanced learning and information security. Lately, he has been actively involved in the FP projects, such as iCamp (creation of a social software based personal learning environment), ELENA (creation of a smart space for learning), PROLEARN (technology enhanced learning) and UNIVERSAL (building of a platform for exchange of learning resources). He is also a team leader in the eContentPlus ICOPER (competency-driven educational framework) and OpenScout (open resources for management teaching and training) projects. His scientific publication list includes over 80 items. Since 2006, Tomaž Klobučar has been involved in organisation of the joint European summer school on technology enhanced learning.

Organization:  Jožef Stefan Institute

Dr. Tanja Arh obtained her PhD degree at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana. She works as a researcher at Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks at Jožef Stefan Institute. The main research areas of her scientific work cover technology-enhanced learning, web 2.0 technologies, organisational learning, usability testing and studies of impact of educational technologies on companies’ business performance. Her research work is performed mostly for European-wide research programmes. She has been successfully integrated her knowledge and research results into her scientific contributions, which includes over 100 publications. She is member of Executive Board of Slovenian Project Management Association, member of Supervisory Board of Slovenian Internet Society and technical editor of scientific journal Project Management Review. She is member of Slovenian Academy of Management.