Rob Koper is professor and director of learning technologies research at the Open University of the Netherlands, where he leads a team of around 40 researchers who are performing research in the methods and technologies for

• personal competence development in the context of formal and informal lifelong learning;
• the development and (re-)use of learning activities, learning resources, digital courses and study programs;
• navigation support, social interaction, learner support and competence assessment in learning networks;
• support for contextualized and personalized learning; and
• architectures, infrastructures, specifications and standards to support lifelong competence development.

He has 22 years of experience in the field. Among other things, he was responsible for the development of Educational Modelling Language (EML), currently an open standard through the IMS consortium (IMS Learning Design), and he leads or participates in a variety of EU-funded R&D projects. He is the coordinator of the EU Integrated
Project TENCompetence, aiming at the development of an Open Source Infrastructure for Lifelong Competence Development. He serves and has served on a variety of editorial boards, program committees, and has been responsible for the organization of a large number of international conferences, seminars and workshops in the field, most recently the IEEE ICALT conference. Additionally, he has had numerous roles on management and advisory boards, such as the National Assessment Agency, the Digital University Consortium, the local government, and standardisation bodies such as IMS and CEN/ISSS.

He publishes regularly in scientific journals and books. Recent co-edited books are:
Integrated eLearning (2004, London: RoutledgeFalmer) and Learning Design: Modeling Network-based Education and Training (2005, Heidelberg: Springer). Some recent special issues he co-edited are: British Journal of Educational Technology (2004 on technology and lifelong learning); Educational Technology & Society (2006 on advances in learning design research and 2007 based on the ICALT 2006 conference); Interactive Learning Environments (due 2007 on lifelong competence development), International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning (due 2007 on reference models for forming organisational or collaborative pedagogical best practices)