Multicampus

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 Association K.U.Leuven 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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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).