Partners

Seven partners have committed themselves to cotribute and participate in the project.

	Name of Institution	Town/Country	Contact
ICCS	Institute of Communication and Computer Systems	Athens/Greece	E. Skordalakis
IICM	Institute for Information and Computer Supported Media	Graz/Austria	H. Maurer
KUL	Katholieke Universiteit Leuven	Leuven/Belgium	E. Duval
OU	Open University	London/G. Britain	D. Benyon
SHC	Stord/Haugesund College	Rommetveit/Norway	H. Haugen
UL	Universite' Lille I	Lille/France	C. Vieville
FUH	Fern Universitat Hagen	Hagen/Germany	B. Kraemer

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Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS)

The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) is associated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). ICCS carries research and development activity in the fields of telecommunication systems, computer systems, software and hardware engineering, control systems and biomedical engineering. Presently, ICCS has 40 members of faculty of DECE/NTUA, 20 additional senior researchers and 100 research students. ICCS has participated in several EU projects.

Recently, ICCS has been involved in educational software developments. Within this activity, an educational package (called ORION) was developed, which is comprised of four course instructional material modules for self-instruction in Informatics. ORION is now used in the Greek secondary public schools. ICCS is now involved in introducing ODL to complement the conventional teaching of some courses in the Informatics section. Also, ICCS has participated in several EU projects.

One of the several laboratories that ICCS has is the Software Engineering Laboratory, which is the coordinating partner in this project. This laboratory is engaged in teaching, development and research in the area of Software Engineering (SE). Its research interests span areas of SE with emphasis on: software development methodologies, man-machine interface, software configuration management, software quality assurance, hypermedia applications, distributed computing, educational software and tele-education.

Recently, research has been directed towards the field of open and distance learning, using the new information and communications technologies. Currently, there are three professors and three graduate research students involved in ODL.

Contact person: E. Skordalakis (skordala@softlab.ntua.gr)

Address:

Polytechnioupoli, Zografou,
Iroon Polytechniou 9,
15773 Zographou, Athens, Greece

Tel:

+30-1-7722487

Fax:

+30-1-7722496

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Institute for Information and Computer Supported Media(IICM)

The Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media (IICM) of the Graz University of Technology is a research unit that has worked exclusively on multi- and hypermedia and their applications to education and electronic publishing over more than the five last years. The main body of IICM is, at the moment, concerned with (networked) computer supported new media, most specifically with aspects of hypermedia systems. The institute is carrying out research in areas related to different hypermedia-based, educational, communicational and cooperational aspects.

IICM employs some 30 staff, both part-time and full-time.

Among other major undertakings, IICM has developed a large networked multimedia system, Hyper-G, which is a purely European development; its distributed database structure, sophisticated search facilities, authorisation mechanisms and annotation and communication facilities make it an excellent candidate as basis for future electronic publishing of educational material, including new ways of interaction such as decision making. IICM has also participated in several European community projects.

Contact person: H. Maurer ( hmaurer@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at)

Address:

Schiebstattgasse 4a,
A-8010 Graz, Austria

Tel:

+43-316-8735612

Fax:

+43-316-824394

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Katholieke Universiteit Leuven(KUL)

The Department of Computer Science is part of the Faculty of Engineering of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The Department was founded in 1981 and consists of two divisions: "Informatics" and "Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics". The research group led by professor Olivié is called Indigo, which stands for "Informatica-Didactiek en Gegevensbanken-Onderzoek", roughly equivalent to "Computer Science Education and Data Bases".

The Department of Computer Science employs circa 100 staff. ODL research is carried out by the Indigo research group, which currently consists of one professor and three full-time researchers.

The research unit Indigo has been active in various European projects in the past, notably CAPTIVE (1989-1991) and Multimedia TeleSchools (1992-1994), both in the DELTA program. In November 1994, the new European project Ariadne, funded under the "Telematics for Education" program, will start. The Indigo group is one of the partners in this project, which focuses on a large resource of pedagogical components and a set of tools to maintain and exploit it. The distributed hypermedia system Home, developed by the Indigo group, will be used for data management and course delivery on an European scale in this project.

Contact person: E. Duval (Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)

Address:

Celestijnenlaan 200A,
B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium

Tel:

+32-16-327643

Fax:

+32-16-327996

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Open University(OU)

The Open University (OU) is the largest supplier of higher education in the United kingdom, with some 140,000 students, of whom around 10,000 are studying outside the UK. All of the OU’s education is performed through Open Distance Learning methods, using very high quality printed texts that contain numerous exercises and activities that facilitate learning. These texts have been supported by contact with a tutor who helps the students with his/her learning problems, communicating through postal services, telephone and some direct meetings.

The OU has over 2,000 employees at its central location in Milton Keynes, and more than 4,000 other employees around the UK. All of these staff are engaged in one capacity of another in ODL activities.

Over the past few years, the university has been exploring a number of uses of IT in its distance learning, using Computer Mediated Conferencing in one course from the late 1980s, moving to its use on several courses today. This use has been carefully monitored by the Institute for Educational Technology within the OU. Use of multi-media has been used in some special residential schools, and is now being considered for inclusion directly as part of the teaching on several courses. The OU has recently founded, within the Computing Department, the Centre for Informatics Education Research (CEIR) to support this move with appropriate research in the area of computer science education.

Contact person: D. Benyon ( D.R.Benyon@open.ac.uk)

Address:

PO Box 77,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes,
MK7 6BT, United Kingdom

Tel:

+44-1908-274066

Fax:

+44-1908-652990

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Stord/Haugesund College(SHC)

Stord/Haugesund College (SHC) offers professional training within education, health care, economics, engineering, and has been particularly involved with studies related to pedagogy in IT and other courses for teacher training. SHC is offering studies in Educational Information Science at all levels, in close cooperation with the University of Bergen). Staff and graduate students in this field are engaged in R&D work with ODL and educational software development.

In this project, SHC represents NITOL (Norway-net with IT for Open Learning), a Norwegian consortium of 4 academic institutions heavily engaged in the production and delivery of ODL. All 4 institutions will participate in and contribute to the SOCRATES activities.

SHC has 200 employees, approximately 10 of which are involved in ODL activities. Within NITOL there are around 3,600 employees, out of which about 150 are involved with ODL.

SHC is project leader of the NITOL project, and was coordinator for the Norwegian part of JITOL. Staff members have been extensively involved with national as well as international activities within IT in education, software development, ODL and teacher training. SHC and the other NITOL institutions participate in both ERASMUS, COMMETT and DELTA programmes.

Contact person: H Haugen ( harald.haugen@hsh.no)

Address:

5414 Rommetveit,
Stord, Norway

Tel:

+47-53491376

Fax:

+47-53491420

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Universite' Lille I(UL)

TRIGONE is a laboratory of the University of Sciences and Technology of Lille 1 in France. This university occupies the first place of the French universities in the continuing education activity. This activity began 20 years ago and has always increased. The CUEEP (Centre Université-Economie Education Permanente) is the institute which initiated this dynamics. The CUEEP has a strong experience in educational engineering. Its research laboratory, TRIGONE, helps it in putting new learning technologies into practice. Together, they have produced multimedia course packages. For several years, they are developing the concept of Open Learning by setting up and articulating Distance Learning, self training, using learning resource centers through the Nord/Pas-de-Calais region.

The CUEEP employs 200 staff, both part-time and full-time.

TRIGONE was a partner of the Co-Learn project. The purpose of Co-Learn (Delta n°2005) was to enhance communications between teachers and learners themselves by the development of a global supporting on line and off line collaborative activities. Relying on the room metaphor the system presents to the user a set of tools to support various kind of group communication allowing distance collaborative learning. TRIGONE is presently involved in the SPACE project funded by the CNET, where it is designing a 3 dimensional interface to support collaborative applications.

Contact person: C. Vieville (Claude.Vieville@univ-lille1.fr)

Address:

Batiment B6 - Cite scientifique,
59655 Villeneuve d’ Ascq CEDEX,
France

Tel:

+33-20-433248

Fax:

+33-20-433279

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Fern Universitat Hagen(FUH)

The Chair of Data Processing Technology (DPT) led by Prof Kraemer is part of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of FernUniversitaet Hagen (FUH). FUH is the only German language institution of higher distance education at the university level and part of the regular Federal and State Government of North-Rhine Westphalia educational structure. FUH is also a member of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). Over 1400 courses are offered by six faculties. The majority of courses is still high quality print material supplemented by video and audio tapes, some 30 Computer-Based Training courses, and regular TV broadcast via satellite. To explore the potential of hyper-media based course-ware, FUH is currently developing fully integrated interactive multi-media courses in several areas with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering taking a lead role.

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering employs some 70 full-time staff. DPT, which is actively involved in the ODL activities, consists of one full professor, seven researchers and technical staff, and six student employees working on a part-time basis.

The Chair of DPT is currently developing an integrated set of two subsequent single semester courses covering basic subjects of information technology. The courses will be the first in FUH’s distance teaching program that fully exploit all capabilities of multi-media. Combining short phases of presence with interleaved media-based self study blocks, they are also suited for use in extension education. The chair participated in the feasibility study Europe-MMM on the efficient usage of remote and online publication of electronic multi-media materials in the Information Engineering section of the Telematics Applications Programme. It is further involved in two international projects in the area of open distributed systems.

Contact person: B. Kraemer (bernd.kraemer@fernuni-hagen.de)

Address:

D-58084, Hagen,
Germany

Tel:

+49-2331-987371

Fax:

+49-2331-987370