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A Story on “Story Telling” in a virtual learn-Work Environment

A Story on “Story Telling” in a virtual learn-Work Environment
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Author(s): Paul Oord (Open Universiteit Nederland, The Netherlands)and Cecile K. M. Crutzen (Open Universiteit Nederland, The Netherlands)
Copyright: 2007
Pages: 5
Source title: Managing Worldwide Operations and Communications with Information Technology
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-929-8.ch095
ISBN13: 9781599049298
EISBN13: 9781466665378

Abstract

The Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) is an institution for higher distance education. At the School of Computer Science 70% of the BA or MA students, already have other degrees and are in paid employment. They want to acquire additional know-how or retrain for a different occupation. In order to meet today’s learning needs of the bachelor students in Computer Science and the needs of ICT-industries for employees with up-to-date domain expertise together with academic team competencies, the OUNL has designed and implemented in the year 2001 for the course ‘Design Project’ (400 hours of study) an open learn-work environment ’OTO’ as a virtual company (VC). Students in this course (re)design a solution for a real-world company’s problem in the domain of computer science. Since OTO started in 2001, 14 teams (about 95 students) have been active in OTO. Knowledge construction in organizations is crucial for the continuous improvement of existing products and services and the development of new ones. As an ICT-professional you need to learn focussing on users, consumers and regarding clients as co-developers of an ICT-product. In this article (story) the environment in which the students are learning and working is described, and how internal knowledge management is implemented in this environment to preserve experiences of students in an informal and narrative way.

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