Major e-learning initiatives in Portugal

University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering

Background Information

Issued from the Academia Politécnica, which was founded in 1837, the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP) / University of Porto is a leading national institution of international reputation whose achievements in research and teaching have established itself in the forefront of the universities of engineering. The Faculty is committed to the highest standards of education, in furtherance of its mission to advance learning and knowledge, preparing professional engineers at an international level. The total staff of FEUP is about 800 workers in teaching, research and administration. The total number of enrolled students is about 5,700,about 10 percent of whom are studying for post-grade degrees. Education is provided by 6 departments in 9 undergraduate, 24 Master degree programmes and Doctoral degrees in 8 areas of engineering.

Virtual Campus initiative

SiFEUP is the strategic project of virtual campus development in FEUP. This award winning system (EUNIS award 2001 - http://www.eunis.org) started its developement in 1996 and is by now the core system for all campus activities. Being a core system of all the activities in the campus, SiFEUP has several objectives, from providing management information to enhancing internal communication procedures and supporting the educational activities. The system provides information on courses, research, people, equipment and spaces for internal use and also for dissemination and reporting activities. It’s based in the Oracle DBMS, and has a open architecture, that allows the integration with other systems, namely the Library Management System and the E-Learning System in use in the Faculty.

The main aim of e-learning at FEUP is to support teaching and learning of on campus students and opening up for off campus students. 6. What support is there for the development of e-learning? GAUTI, the Office for User Support on Information Technologies is responsible for providing support to the teachers for multimedia content development and also manages the e-learning system of the Faculty. The Office has specialized human resources and multimedia equipment and provides its services to selected projects evaluated in a regular basis.

SiFEUP provides several tools for planning and management of educational activities.For example, students and teachers have online access to timetables, classroom information and mailing lists of courses. There is also an online reservation system for presentation equipment and workstation time. All the management level information, including grades is also available online.

SiFEUP development and maintenance is the responsability of the Computing Services Centre. The Director of the Computing Services is also member of the Management Committee of the Office for User Support on Information Technologies, ensuring a strong coordination of activities. There are several specific ICT infrastructure development projects: Wireless LAN, Extranetsupport, Video streaming and Public Information Systems .

The Director of the Library is a member of the Management Committee of the Office for User Support on Information Technologies. The Library Management System is being integrated with SiFEUP and e-learning systems, mainly concerning certification, quality control and metadata issues. The Library is also involved in Electronic Publishing activities.

The SiFEUP provides several tools to support research: project information, curricula,published papers, all with search facilities integrated with the Library Information System.

Based on Interview in [[1]] page 46