Target Audience: Higher Education Faculty/Staff, Technology Specialists

How to Participate: Must be a MAGPI member and have H.323 videoconference capabilities. REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

Description:

This presentation was first made at the European University Information Systems, (EUNIS) Conference in Grenoble, France in July 2007. The EC has experienced social and political pressures that have led to advanced uses of the network for online learning between universities in all the member nations. This presentation will be most beneficial to higher educational institutions in the United States with collaborative or inter-campus E-Learning programs.

Swiss (Inter) National Learning Object Repository

During the years 2000-2007 the Swiss national program, “Swiss Virtual Campus,” promoted learning over the Internet with Swiss institutions of higher education. In the initial phase from 2000-2003, significant funding was provided to establish and promote the development of expertise in the use of online learning units with the goals of using faculty and students from multiple universities, compatibilities with the European Credit Transfer System, being multi-lingual where appropriate, and supporting aspects leading towards continuing education. The national research and education network, SWITCH, was empowered with the responsibility to evaluate both proprietary and open source content management programs which lead to phase 2 of the project. It was deemed necessary to provide mechanisms whereby the online material was housed centrally and made accessible to higher education across Switzerland, older courses were updated, and new ones added. It was also important to establish competence centers to ensure technically correct and proper use of the courseware

In the final stages of this program, SWITCH has established prototypes whereby content is stored locally, but the metadata harvesting and distributed search provide a mechanism to retrieve learning objects as if they were stored in a centralized system. 

More information can be found at: http://www.magpi.net/programs/hottopics.html