An Operational Conception of Virtual Mobility

From Researching Virtual Initiatives in Education

The E-move: An Operational Conception of Virtual Mobility (E-move) project was selected in 2005, and funded from 1 January in 2006 until 31 December 2007 by the European Commission - DG Education & Culture under the eLearning programme.

The E-move web site is at http://www.eadtu.nl/e-move

Summary

The E‐MOVE project focused on four separate types, models and scenarios for organising virtual mobility:

1. Organising a pool of international courses: choosing courses from different foreign institutions
2. Building a Virtual Community: creating virtual mobility in the framework of an international learning experience by ICT within a course
3. Creating an international virtual space for joint courses and joint programmes with international partners and
4. Facilitating European access to suitable and relevant courses for continuing professional training and development.

The project explored the critical success factors of these four types of Virtual Mobility and implemented these in real Open and Distance Teaching courses. It worked on two interrelated and parallel running action lines: ‘Observatory’ and ‘Implementation’. The result of the implementation action line (test‐beds and case studies) is an overview of possibilities, constraints and good practice within the implementation of the four models of virtual mobility. The observatory, consisting of experts in distance education and virtual mobility, analysed, harmonised and integrates these results in examples of good practice and actual implementation. In supporting the implementation of virtual mobility also a European information sharing portal was established for library and information support to students and staff operating in virtual mobility.

Outcomes

Project results are gathered on the E-MOVE Portal Web Site; and in the E-Move guide to Virtual Mobility.

Partners

• EADTU (The Netherlands)
• FernUni Hagen (Germany)
• Open Universiteit Nederland (The Netherlands)
• The Open University (UK)
• Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) (Spain)
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) (Spain)
• Network per l'Universita Ovunque (NETTUNO) (Italy)
• Estonian Information Technology Foundation (EITSA) (Estonia)
• Polish Virtual University (Poland)
• Open Learning Foundation (OLF) (UK
• National Council for Distance Education (Apertus) (Hungary
• Danish Association of Open Universities (DAOU) (Denmark)
• Johannes Kepler Universität Linz (Austria)

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