VENUS - Virtual and E-mobility for Networking Universities in Society

Type of project: EUROPEAN COMMISSION, Directorate-General for Education and Culture, ELearning Programme
Project application number: 2005-3867/001-001ELE ELEB12

Aims:

VENUS aims to internationalise certain prestigious courses, with international scope and importance, in each member university through virtual mobility, open to both students and citizens. The most appealing and interesting content items are obviously those promoting European citizenship, collaboration and personal development. In fact, it is partly inspired by a successful local initiative taking place in the University of Leuven called “Lessons of the XXIst century”.

VENUS has three main objectives:

• Implement virtual mobility schemes in the mainstream offer of Higher Education and provide teaching and management staff within educational institutions with the right background, training, tools and strategy plans on how to do this.
• Extend the traditional target public of universities, students, to all citizens interested in lifelong personal development
• Motivate universities to broaden their content to a European perspective and encourage the European Identity amongst all citizens

Main Outcomes:

• Outcome 1: A virtual “Faculty of Extension” in each university in terms of geography, target group and teaching methods, offering “International – Regional” Virtual Seminars, open to every citizen, using virtual means to deliver the contents and engage interaction and collaboration. There will be a seminar series (9 virtual seminars) during the first full academic year and a virtual 1 week summer school. After these, the Faculty of Extension in each partner will kick-start a sustainable virtual mobility scheme (i.e. a new series of seminars, see outcome 5).
• Outcome 2: An Online module entitled “Europe in Focus” that contains recordings and learning materials that will be derived from the seminar series and summer school and will be published.
• Outcome 3: Jointly developed training materials on virtual instruction to be used during the training workshops. These training materials will draw as much as possible on existing materials and will be bundled in:
• A modular Virtual Seminar Organisation Handbook (~150 p., EN, FR, DE) supported by online interactive tutorials, specifically on the organisation and facilitation of virtual seminars for higher education and lifelong learning. It will include modules on
• Suitable instructional design models,
• Case-studies,
• Technical guidelines,
• Guidelines on using, sharing, re-purposing and storing virtual and collaboratively developed seminar content,
• Guidelines on multilingualism and multiculturalism in a networked university environment
• Outcome 4: A documented strategy for Higher Education Institutions and their partners (for higher management staff) in education on how to successfully organise self-sustainable, high quality and certified virtual mobility schemes into their educational offer on an ongoing basis.
• Outcome 5: The set-up of a sustainable virtual mobility scheme accepted in the mainstream educational offer of the partners and outside the partnership in the last phase of the project based upon the experiences from the first seminar series and the summer school.

Outcome 6: At least three training workshops for interested parties outside the partnership who want to replicate the models suggested by the VENUS partnership. These training workshops will continue after the projects lifetime as their scope is in line with some of the core objectives of some of the main partners (e.g. the mission statement of EuroPACE is entitled “Towards a Virtual University for Europe”)

Partners:

• EuroPACE, Belgium
• Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
• Audiovisual Technologies, Informatics and Telecommunications bvba (ATiT), Belgium
• University of Cologne - Faculty of Management, Economics, and Social Sciences-“WISO-Fakultät”, Germany
• Helsinki University of Technology, Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli, Finland
• University of West-Hungary, College of Geoinformatics, Hungary
• West Pomeranian Business School, Poland
• Technical University of Kosice - Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Slovakia
• Consorzio NETTUNO, Italy