Summary

This project is related with the fifth sector of application of the EUMEDIS initiative, that is, “Euro-Mediterranean Pilot projects in the field of Education”. The goal of this project is to design and implement a web-based multilingual virtual space for collaborative learning focused on higher education.

This platform will offer training according to the different higher education programmes of the origin countries of the partners. More exactly, a course of a certain university degree of each of the country partners will be design, implemented and used in a pilot experience.

The format of the contents of the course will be adapted to the possibilities of the network used to deliver the contents. The number of multimedia elements will be in accordance with the available bandwith of access to the correspondent network.

Objective

This project tries to improve the higher education of the partner regions by offering web-based contents related with different subjects corresponding to official study programmes of the higher education of the country.

The contents will be designed by an interdisciplinary workgroup of different specialists including pedagogists and psychologists, telecommunication and computing engineers, graphical designers, experts on the contents to be delivered, etc. Any single member of the team is indispensable: The pedagogists and psychologists will asses on how to structure and present the contents.

The telecommunication and computing engineers will decide which technologies should be used to implement the contents according to the infrastructure available in the regions taking part in the project.

The experts on the contents will provide the contents for the teaching modules.

The telecommunication and computing engineers together with the graphical designers will implement the contents provided by the experts that will take part also in this process supervising it.

The contents of the training modules will be offered in a virtual classroom belonging to a collaborative learning space. These virtual classrooms will offer several services including synchronous and asynchronous communication, a notice board and an calendar-agenda, also the students will have access to the contents, the scheduled activities, etc. The communication space of the classrooms will be dynamized by a teacher. This guide will encourage the students to participate in the synchronous and asynchronous communications and in all the activities organised along the whole duration of the course.

The training module designed by each country partner will be in the origin language and in English.

Once the collaborative virtual learning space and the training modules are ready (implemented and tested), several pilot experiences will take place. The idea is that the teaching modules in mother languages are used in the own country, with the participation of one or two teachers and some students from other countries that have a good command of that language. On the other side, the English module will be used with a group of students from the different partner countries and by two or three teachers also from different partner countries, all of them having a good command of the English language. The decision of which teachers and students take part in the same pilot experience will be based on several factors like the command of the language to be used or the matching of the training module designed with the study programmes of the higher education of the country.

The objective of these mixed training experiences is not only to learn how to teach or how to learn in a virtual space, or to acquire some new knowledge, but also to live an intercultural experience and as a consequence become more tolerant and establish ties among the

Partners

1.  Centro para el Desarrollo de las Telecomunicaciones de Castilla y León (CEDETEL).
2. University of Salamanca (USAL).
3. University of Granada.
4. Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (FHTW).
5. Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).
6. University of Jordan.
7. Institut Supérieur de Gestion et de Planification (ISGP).
8. University of Malta (UOM).
9. Anadolu University.
10. University of Cyprus.
11. Institute Agronomique et Vétérinaire Hassan II.
12. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
13. Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST).
14. Retecal Interactiva S.A..
15. Frederick Institute of Technology (FIT).
16. Cairo University.
17. University of Valladolid (UVA)