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.

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 iniative 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 iniative 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

The 'traditional university' Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) in Belgium progressively organizes its educational support from a multicampus perspective.

A Multicampus University

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.

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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