Université de Liège

The Université de Liège (University of Liege , ULg) supports e-learning through its intranet “My ULg” for the entire university, through Learning Online @ccess (Lol@) and its Campus Virtuel en Gestion for its Management School HEC-ULg

"The University of Liege is the only public, pluralist and complete university institution of the French Walloon-Brussels community. It aims at maintaining a fair balance between teaching, research and community service activities, in the broad lines recognised by its complete university status."

The institution’s main office and departments are located in Liege, Belgium. It operates additional centres in the south of Belgium in Arlon and at Mont-Rigi (Hautes Fagnes) as well as the Stareso oceanographic base at Calvi (Corsica). The ULg consists of 7 Faculties, 1 Institute, 1 School and 41 departments.

The Université de Liège enrolls 17,000 students and employs a staff of 4,300.

ULg has its own research and expertise center in distance learning called Laboratoire de Soutien à l'Enseignement Télématique (LabSET).

My ULg

The intranet “My ULg” is split into two for the two user groups: students and teachers. Its first version was established in 2004 and is mentioned to be not just as a course management tool for students and management platform for teachers and staff but aimed at the whole university community as a real tool for e-governance with online payments and the ULg states that “in the past 12 months, more than 160 million page views (over 250,000 pages per day) by more than 16,000 distinct users were viewed and our students have downloaded a total of 10,000 GB (10 TB) files relating to their courses.” Some features are also for visitors to ULg such as keeping records Erasmus for students wishing to stay in Liege, a procedure pre-registration for future students, curriculum, ...

After logging in into the intranet, students can access their webmail, WebCT (the platform for online education) and the Learn Online @access / Lol@ platform specific to students from HEC-ULg.

More information can be found at http://www.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_54635/myulg-portail-des-etudiants (French).

The ULg thus offers what the university sometimes references as their “virtual campus” as mentioned in the an article: The MegaTrends project listed a case study article on the Virtual Campus of the University of Liège in their second book, [Megaproviders of e-learning in Europe (PDF - 212 pages) (ISBN 978 82 562 88184). The article “The Virtual Campus of the University of Liège”, Belgium (PDF), 12 pages, 2007, by Prof. Marianne Poumay, Director of LabSET, University of Liège is available in English and French.

The article mentioned that all students are involved in the e-learning services. As mentioned by Béatrice Lecomte, who is also working for LabSET and who the editors from ATiT had contact with, the virtual campus started without a straightforward strategyout as an experiment which they kept improving. New staff members of the ULg are trained in WebCT, e-learning and its possibilities. The IFRES training involving all the e-learning services is 10x half-day sessions in the first 2 years a staff member joins the ULg. In this training for instance the best practices of WebCT are shown to the staff.

e-Agora

e-Agora is “the e-learning project at ULg to support, increase and improve the use of online courses”. It is meant to support the development of online courses across the University and to built up a community around higher education instructional development and e-learning. It includes resources and online trainings to WebCT but also pedagogical resources like online course showcases (for instance for Blackboard/WebCT) to help faculty, instructors and course designers to create and improve course activities.

HEC-ULg with CVG and Lol@

Furthermore, the Faculty/Department Management School HEC-ULg which has a virtual campus for 1 master called Campus Virtuel en Gestion and also the Lol@ platform or "Learning Online @ccess.

The ULg web site is at http://www.ulg.ac.be, the intranet for students is located at http://my.ulg.be and e-Agora can be found at http://www.elearning.ulg.ac.be. Furthermore you have Campus Virtuel en Gestion and Lol@.

Together with the Faculté Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux, this university is part of the association Académie universitaire Wallonie-Europe.

Reports

The Virtual Campus at the University of Liege. “WebCT CE6, Aide en ligne de l'étudiant”, a student guide for use of WebCT (PDF), 169 pages

Megatrends case study: “The Virtual Campus of the University of Liège, Belgium”(PDF EN 12 pages) by Prof. Marianne Poumay, Director of LabSET, University of Liège. The article mentioned that all students are involved in the e-learning services.