VICADIS

1.Information

LLP project: “VICADIS – Virtual Campus for Digital Students”, Agreement 2007-2611/001-001, Project number 134039-LLP-1-2007-1-RO-ERASMUS-EVC

Director: Prof.dr.eng. Radu VASIU
Value: 365.747 EURO
Period: 2007-2010

Members:
Assoc.lect.eng. Diana ANDONE
Lect.dr.eng. Mugur MOCOFAN
Assist.eng. Marian BUCOS
Assist.eng. Mihai ONITA
Eng. Marius CONDREA
Assistant Delia ROBESCU-TANASE
Dr.eng. Cristian TECU
Dr.eng. Iasmina ERMALAI
Andrei TERNAUCIUC, PhD student
Bogdan DRAGULESCU, PhD student
Tatiana TERNAUCIUC

Partners:
Universita degli Studi di Palermo, Italy
Baltic Education Technologies Institute, Lithuania
University of Miskolc, Hungary
Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Finland
University of Brighton, UK
VISIONI Di Caro arch. Ernesta, Italy
Euro-Contact Business School, Hungary
BRIDGEMAN SRL, Romania
JME Associates Ltd, UK

Project web page: www.vicadis.net

2.Objectives

The main objective is to build a virtual campus for digital students aimed at providing open educational resources and tools available and accessible for all students and ensuring the interoperability between the different eLearning environments used in the partner universities.

Aims of the project:

• To overview and implement emerging tools and technology commonly referred to as “social software” that can create personal as opposed to institutional learning environments, as well as the mobile learning tools.
• To support practitioners in becoming aware of the new features of the digital students, to learn to effectively use and develop resources with new digital technologies and new communication tools in ways that are aligned with what they want to achieve educationally.
• To provide the organisational and technical framework for the development of an interoperable virtual campus
• To make available a virtual campus based on Open Educational Resources which will offer a free, open personal learning environment
• To improve the quality of education in eLearning by international co-operation and by new methodological approach to learning. The project intends to develop an interoperable virtual campus, not a new one to replace the existing ones used in the universities, and to provide a new methodology based on modern techniques of education such as open sources, adaptability and interactive learning.
• To evaluate, test and transfer the ICT tools, pedagogical methodology and the Set of Guidelines to other education and training areas and throughout Europe.

The main scope of ViCaDiS is to provide an accessible and attractive environment for all students within the Member States, using already existing tools which will be enhanced with new tools wanted by the new generation of students. By providing students the tools which they use anyway extensively outside the institutional framework of learning (wiki, blogs, forums, IM, podcasting, RSS) ViCaDiS will support the learning attractiveness of the university curricula, will improve the quality of the learning process by encouraging the exchange of information/knowledge between students from different universities, and will reduce university drop-out or student de-motivation for learning. It will also produce an instructional or pedagogical shift inside the universities eLearning moving the focus from the education materials and technology to the user- student, to user generated content.
In ViCaDiS, a wide range of ODL actors from EU and CEE countries will focus on developing an innovative approach for enhancing international eLearning by moving the strength from the institutional learning environment to the personal learning environment (PLE) which focuses on students. It will also produce an instructional or pedagogical shift inside universities eLearning moving the focus from the education materials and technology to the user-student, to user generated content.
The main objective is to build a virtual campus for digital students aimed at providing open educational resources and tools available and accessible for all students and to ensure the interoperability between the different eLearning environments used in the partner universities.
The goal of ViCaDiS is to create an attractive environment for all students within the Member States, using already existing tools which will be enhanced with new tools wanted by the new generation of students. An innovative multilingual ICT-based environment unique in Europe (as an international virtual campus), it will incorporate several open educational resources (library, glossary, external links, student projects, course activities), open educational tools (wiki, blog, forum, calendar, podcasting, instant messaging communication, audio-video conferencing over IP, RSS, mobile text messaging, mobile accessibility to ViCaDiS) and will promote social networking as an instructional method.

The project workpackages are:

• Developing and testing of the ViCaDiS scenario
• ViCaDiS tools design and implementation
• Piloting/testing and evaluation of ViCaDiS
• Evaluation and elaboration of the Set of Guidelines
• Exploitation of ViCaDiS
• Dissemination and Awareness raising of ViCaDiS
• Project management of ViCaDiS

The main outcomes of the project are:

• open personal learning environment methodology
• ViCaDiS multilingual virtual campus: online environment and mobile environment based on Open Educational Resources
• Multilingual web portal
• Multilingual Set of Guidelines (on paper, CD and online)
  ViCaDiS evaluation
• Promotional and multiplication materials