Virtual campus

Overview

The phrase "virtual campus" became prominent around 1997, when various universities launched their versions of a virtual campus. It is often applied to a single university which has a virtual university “fringe” round a physical campus, but there are some totally virtual campuses, such as the Open University of Catalonia. Now there are at least 10 virtual campus operations in the UK and many more elsewhere. Increasingly a university may no longer use the phrase "virtual campus" while still in fact having one.

The Re.ViCa Working Definition of Virtual Campus: A modern synthesis

In Re.ViCa we aim to take virtual campus as synonymous with large-scale e-learning initiative. This avoids the issue of giving distance e-learning a privileged position over campus-based e-learning but begs the question of what is large-scale? Here we suggest some indicators which suggest large-scale - note that not all of them need to be satisfied.

An e-learning initiative in a university - or consortium of universities - is major if it has many (but not necessarily all) of the following characteristics:

• It requires at least one per cent of the institutional budget (this is a rule of thumb taken from Activity Based Costing theory that it is pointless to track from the top any initiatives below that level of expenditure)
• The person responsible (as the majority proportion of his/her job) for leading that initiative has a rank and salary at least equivalent to that of a university full professor at Head of Department level, or equivalent rank of administrative or technical staff (usually an Assistant Director) - and ideally that of Dean or full Director
• There is a specific department to manage and deliver the iniative with a degree of autonomy from mainstream IT, library, pedagogic or quality structures
• Progress of the initiative is overseen by a Steering Group chaired by one of the most senior managers in the institution (in UK terms, a Pro-Vice Chancellor)
• The initiative is part of the institution's business plan and is not totally dependent on any particular externally funded project
• There are strategy, planning and operational documents defining the initiative and regularly updated
• The head of the institution (Vice-Chancellor, Rector, President, etc) will from time to time in senior meetings be notified of progress and problems with the initiative
• The head of the institution is able to discuss the initiative in general terms with equivalent heads of other institutions - in the way that he/she would be able to discuss a new library, laboratory or similar large-scale development

Virtual campus definition of the European Commission

Cooperation between higher education institutions in the field of e-learning, regarding: design of joint curricula development by several universities, including agreements for the evaluation, validation and recognition of acquired competences, subject to national procedures; large–scale experiments of virtual mobility in addition to physical mobility and development of innovative dual mode curricula, based on both traditional and on-line learning methods. This broad definition involves many issues from partnerships between traditional and/or distance universities and HEI with a view to offering joint certifications (for undergraduate and/or postgraduate levels) and cooperation with learning support services. This might also include collaborative activities in strategic areas of education or research through cooperation involving researchers, academics, students, management, administrative and technical personnel. 'Virtual campuses' should not be confused with e-learning platforms.

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/guide/glossary_en.html

At the e-learningeuropa.info portal 'Virtual Campus' is defined as "Part of a university or faculty that offers educational facilities at any time or, in theory, any place, by Internet."

Source: http://www.elearningeuropa.info/main/index.php?page=glossary&abc=V

At a European Commission consultation workshop held in Brussels on 23rd November 2004 entitled “The ‘e’ for our universities – virtual campus” (EACEA, 2004), one of the working groups proposed three definitions emphasising different aspects of a virtual campus. These were the:

(i) Collaboration perspective: The term "virtual campus" denotes ICT-based collaboration of different partners supporting both, learning offers and research in a distributed setting.

(ii) Enterprise (economic) perspective: The term "virtual campus" denotes an ICT-based distributed learning and research enterprise.

(iii) Networked organisation perspective: The term "virtual campus" denotes an environment, which augments and/or integrates learning and research services offered by different partners.

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/education/archive/elearning/doc/workshops/virtual%20campuses/report_en.pdf

Virtual campus definition of the BENVIC Project

The concept of a Virtual Campus refers to a specific format of distance education and on-line learning in which students, teaching staff and even university administrative and technical staff mainly 'meet' or communicate trough technical links.

Source: http://www.benvic.odl.org/indexpr.html

Virtual campus definition of Wikipedia

A Virtual Campus refers to the online offerings of a college or university where college work is completed either partially or wholly online, often with the assistance of the teacher, professor, or teaching assistant.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Campus

Virtual Campus by Van Dusen

The Virtual Campus is a metaphore for the teaching, learning and research environment created by the convergence of new powerful instruction and communication technologies

Source: E-learning in Spain: The consolidation of the earliest take-off, Albert Sangra

Van Dusen (1997

Virtual campus synonyms in other countries

Belgium

1. "Campus Virtuel" (FR) such as for the
   1. Virtual Campus of the University of Liege, MegaTrends case study (PDF)
   2. Campusvirtuel.be from 3 Business Schools (Solvay, HEC-ULg and LSM), article in French: "Solvay, HEC-ULg et la LSM créent ensemble un campus virtuel"
2. "Virtuele Campus" (NL) which was formerly used to describe:
   1. a terminated school project as a Second Life campus for Catholic University College Ghent (formerly KaHo Sint-Lieven)
   2. a virtual tour and information guide of the University of Antwerp, which is now redirected to a new URL with the appropriate title "

France

1. "Université Virtuelle"
2. "Campus Virtuel"
3. "Campus numérique"
4. "Université Numérique (de Région)"

Visit our wiki page VC definition - France

Multicampus University (K.U.Leuven)

The 'traditional university' Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) in Belgium progressively organizes its educational support from a multicampus perspective. In recent decades, the K.U.Leuven in Belgium has become a multicampus university. As a result of the historic expansion of the university its three groups of faculties have become separate entities, geographically spread over Leuven: Human Sciences are housed in the centre of the city, Exact Sciences in the east and Medical Sciences in the north. Since 1965, the university also has an additional campus in Kortrijk, in the west of Belgium. And in 2002, thirteen institutions of higher education in Flanders have joined forces with the K.U.Leuven in the K.U.Leuven Association in order to occupy a position of strength within the new European educational landscape and to work together towards quality improvements in education. This Association has 23 different campuses. In addition the K.U.Leuven profiles itself as an international university. The institution has agreements with various universities worldwide to enable and support a growing number student and staff exchanges between campuses. Lastly, with the introduction of ICT the university is also facing an extended form of multicampus education. Online networks of student groups and/or teaching staff – sometimes linked to but often independent from the institution – are emerging, in learning communities or communities of practice. Each participant in these networks can be considered a small virtual ‘campus’, learning from home, work or through a mobile device.

Enhancing or replacing physical mobility with virtual mobility

The current structure of the university thus challenges the K.U.Leuven to organize and support its education with attention for communication and collaboration between the various campuses. Today this is most often realized through physical mobility: staff and/or student move between different locations. This is the case for interdisciplinary courses between Leuven’s three groups of faculties and for staff mobility between Kortrijk and Leuven. It is also the most common form for international exchanges. Yet the university is progressively supporting initiatives that replace or enhance physical with virtual mobility, seeking to integrate aspects of ‘virtual campuses’ into traditional education to stimulate collaboration between the sites of the Association, to support student and/or staff exchanges in Europe or in the world, to enhance communication with developing countries or to sustain virtual learning communities.

Joint course materials

At a basic level (virtual/blended) multicampus education in Leuven is revealed in initiatives that create, offer and localize joint course materials. While teaching staff and students remain at their own campus for the entire course, specific course modules learning materials are used that have been developed, at a distance, by an inter-institutional (multicampus) teaching team. These course materials are often offered on a common website, a databank or a virtual learning environment. Recently there are also teachers who (co-)develop or use ‘Open Educational Resources’.

Pooled infrastructure

Not only course materials are collaboratively created or shared. Also (laboratory)-infrastructure is shared between locations to avoid a double set up of equipment. In some cases this pooled infrastructure is also virtual. Some (dangerous) laboratory experiments or experiments that require students and staff to be at different locations (students watch a complex surgical operation) can now happen thanks to virtual support to bridge the distance between the actual experiment and the audience. The infrastructure of the experiment itself is in a limited number of cases entirely digital by means of a simulation on a common virtual platform.

Joint learning activities

Furthermore, multicampus education can be about joint learning activities. For the ‘Student Business Game’ for instance, students from different institutions f the Association K.U.Leuven play a business game on their own campus after which the winning teams compete with each other via videoconferencing before a jury of teaching and company staff. Joint learning activities can also be about e-coaching, about writing an academic paper at a distance or student placements. All activities invite multiple sites to collaborate in the creation, delivery or support of the activity, with the help of technology. At K.U.Leuven joint learning activities are particularly interesting for interdisciplinary modules, courses or programs, such as activities involving both learners studying medicine or nursing, industrial or civil engineering, etc.

Joint courses

Building on joint learning activities, another type of multicampus are joint courses. A joint course can be (a) a course developed by one campus (institution) and offered to students at another campus (institution), (b) a course developed by one institution and used but adapted by another institution or (c) a jointly developed course offered to students of all involved institutions (Haake et al., 2006). One variation of this type are virtual seminars: co-created or co-delivered seminars set up as a single course, or in a series of courses - broadcasted over multiple sites using ICT (videoconferencing, web conferencing, streaming, etc) . The KULeuven has a strong expertise and long tradition in organizing virtual seminars. The ‘Pentalfa’ project for instance is a multidisciplinary, post-graduate distance learning initiative of the Faculty of Medicine, aimed to offer (extra) training broadcasted to various hospitals of the Flemish Hospital Network K.U.Leuven. It is currently in its 8th year and there are plans to enhance the initiative with an international component. The university is also looking into the use of virtual seminars for knowledge exchange and networking between the institutions of the Association and beyond (society in general, companies, alumni, etc.).

Multicampus programmes

Next, multicampus education is also revealed in the offer of a complete, ‘multicampus’ programme, which many institutions can be contributing in. A number of Bachelors and Masters are already set up within the Association K.U.Leuven, involving multiple teaching teams from different institutions. The challenge is to streamline these programs around a common denominator, yet with respect to any local specificities of each campus involved. Virtual initiatives – joint learning materials, joint learning activities, joint courses – all play a vital part in this. Eventually a completely virtual multicampus programme comes close to the traditional form of distance education, as offered by the Open University for instance. From the perspective of more and better flexibility in education, it could be interesting to bring distance and regular education together. Regular programs could put forward a number of distance learning courses (and vice versa), in replacement of or as an enhancement to their offer: they could support or realize the transition between certain bachelors and masters in a flexible way, (work) students could enhance their own study package with a number of distance education courses. In Flanders, the current offers of both the regular universities and the Open University are still entirely separate from each other. Yet under certain conditions the Open University does already allow its students to take courses from other universities in addition to the curriculum of the own education. K.U.Leuven is currently studying the opportunity to present this interpretation of multicampus to its students.

Virtual support activities for physical mobility

Ultimately, multicampus education is also about a range of virtual support activities with regard to real, physical mobility. A large range of actions can be mentioned here. At the early, preparatory phase of a physical student (or staff) exchange, multicampus support can be given through the set up of community websites for future exchange students where they can meet current students who help them find housing, give them information etc. Within the Association K.U.Leuven such a platform is being created and tested for new foreign students to find a ‘(virtual) buddy’ . There is also the opportunity for teaching staff to meet the interested new students online, for a language ‘pre-selection’ or just a first get-together. This has been tested as a pilot in the REVE project for the Erasmus Mundus Master in Adapted Physical Activity (Rajagopal et. al., 2006; Bijnens H. et. al., 2006). After the exchange, the aforementioned communities can continue to live on as a virtual alumni platform; or students could be examined at a distance through virtual mobility (video communication).

Source

Bijnens H., De Gruyter J., Op de Beeck I., Bacsich P., Reynolds S., Van Petegem W., Re-defining virtual campuses: from a “fully-fletched” virtual campus to a blended model. Paper accepted for the EDEN conference. Lisbon, June 11-14, 2008.

Finnish definitions

Finnish Virtual University, one the major projects of Finnish information society activities late 1990’s and the 2000’s in higher education field, defines its own portal as a virtual campus (Finnish: virtuaalikampus) for students, teachers, researchers and administrative staff working in online education The portal links together the virtual activities of the Finnish universities and provides services that can be used by all the participants.

SOCRATES Thematic Network Enhancing Engineering Education in Europe – E4 Survey of Virtual Campus and Virtual University Activities in Europe (2002) takes holistic approach and defines virtual campus as a broad conceptual framework for tools, services and facilities for students, faculty and staff. The word “campus” is used to denote the environment for the people who study, carry out research or work at the university. These elements include e learning, research activities, administrative services or other functions, i.e. complementing and supporting life on the physical university campus.

The approach taken by Finnish higher education society nowadays is a logic continuum of E4 definition, following the ideas of the National Information Society Policy for 2007 -2011 (The Ubiquitous Information Society Advisory Board): the key processes and interaction are largely based on the utilisation of electronic communications and information technology. ICT applications contribute to service provision and availability and create new operating models and new skills. The key elements are communications infrastructure, user-oriented services, development of digital contents and promotion of innovation activities and telework and development of science infrastructure. The use of ICT in teaching and studying is promoted. It is not seen as a separate target area as such but merely integrated into all processes of education and development of new electronic learning environment. This approach is often described as “ICT supported university” (Finnish: TVT-tuettu yliopisto) or “digitalization of the university” in university context.

Sources: Ubiquitous Information Society, Action Programme 2008–2011

History and detail

The concept of virtual university, now so ubiquitous, is in fact only around 11 years old in its current usage. By the phrase virtual university, we (and most people) mean a university which carries out much of its teaching, perhaps all of it, at a distance from the learner.

Even at an early workshop on this topic, at the EdMedia/EdTelecom conference in Boston in June 1996, organised at short notice by Robin Mason and me (both then at the UK Open University), the room was packed out. There was a workshop on virtual universities at Online Educa at Berlin in November 1996 and the topic featured largely in the Sheffield conference “Flexible Learning on the Information Super-Highway” in May 1997. Since then the topic has exploded, with conferences around the world featuring the concept, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else.

In the past, virtual teaching was carried out by posting text-books to the student, who read them and sent back assignments to be marked. Communication between the stu-dent and the academic was via correspondence – hence the phrases correspondence teaching and correspondence university. This approach in fact still happens in many institutions today, especially in less developed parts of the world.

In the early 1970s, the use of television broadcasting for teaching in Universities (ad-ditional to correspondence teaching) became popular, most notably in the UK Open University – originally called the “University of the Air”. Some TV-based universities still exist, but the tale of the use of broadcast TV in universities (including open uni-versities) has so far been one of a long broad retreat masked by a number of tempo-rary local advances. The paradigm of mostly correspondence and print (with perhaps a little TV) lasted many years, but from the early 1990s, under the impact of information technology in general and the Internet in particular, a new paradigm emerged. This is to use the Internet for all the teaching in a virtual university – thus courses would be “delivered” to the student with a PC at home (or at work – and sometimes in a learning centre) and the student would interact via e-mail and Web pages. Increasingly, people use the term e-university for this. In the past, many other terms were prevalent, each with their own nuancing – online university, net university, etc.

In an extreme model – pure-play, as it is called in the dot-com world – this use of the Internet would totally replace the use of text-books, correspondence teaching and tele-vision. While there are some institutions adopting this extreme view (which has the advantage of simplifying the logistics), it is most common to be blended, that is, to have a mix of old and new technologies, with the new gradually growing in impor-tance.

In the Gazetteer, which gives a list of e-universities around the world (and their Web sites), we give the following pragmatic description of e-universities:

Accredited university-level institutions delivering degree-awarding courses, with a substantial percentage delivered at a distance, with a substantial percentage of these using e-learning. If there is a face-to-face university at the core, we expect the courses delivered at a distance to come from a separately named part of the university, and to be referenced from a high level of the university Web site by such phrases as “Virtual Campus”, “Online Service” or some such.

Because of the need to fund the development of materials, and the fact that collabora-tion is easier and cheaper via the Internet, it became common to develop virtual uni-versity systems via consortia of universities. However, there is no firm evidence that this is a better approach in general than a single university doing the development, often called a virtual campus.

The phrase virtual campus became prominent in the UK around 1997, when various UK universities launched their versions of a virtual campus. It is often applied to a single university which has a virtual university “fringe” round a physical campus, but there are some totally virtual campuses, such as the Open University of Catalonia. Now there are at least 10 virtual campus operations in the UK and many more elsewhere. Increasingly, especially in the UK, a university may no longer use the phrase virtual campus while still in fact having one.

A number of other phrases have crept in over the years. A distance-teaching univer-sity is essentially a correspondence university. An open university is in strict terms a university which has an open admissions policy (i.e., anyone can become a student, although not anyone can graduate – students still have to pass the course) but increas-ingly this term is used to describe distance-teaching universities in general, and even those which are not open in this sense. It was for reasons of this sort that the European Commission theorists coined the phrase open and distance learning (ODL), basically to avoid making difficult distinctions.

And in the last few years, the phrase borderless education (rarely borderless university) has come into vogue, under influence from Australian work.

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