Advanced methods for virtual studies
Knowledge overcoming distances - a concept professors and students alike would have found ludicrous some years ago. The traditional concept of educational institutions being a "place one went to" has yielded to distance learning programmes. Today, with the introduction of the advanced educational platform; European Virtual University, students and tutors from different corners of the world are being brought closer together through a single, virtual education portal. The idea for the Federated European Virtual University originally derived from the need for students to combine work and study without the need to change or travel to a distant location. Additionally the Federated European Virtual University intended to create an educational platform where resources and services of affiliated institutions would interact with one another. The CUBER project consists of an innovative classification system that with the help of a comprehensive XML metadata schema organises distance learning course modules by offering access to multiple education programmes offered on the web. This means that students can chose the course they want, when they want it, regardless of which university they are currently enrolled in. The technology also uses a meta-ontology to capture the definition of all concepts and stream the search to a pertinent few, i.e. description of courses, preparation time, how the course is delivered, teacher requirements and more. In order to enable the user to retrieve information effectively and rapidly, the system is comprised of two main parts: a knowledge base, authoring interface and search engine. The knowledge base contains details on courses of one or more subject domains. The authoring interface provides the tools on how educational institutions can best present their study programs, courses and materials. Students use the search engine to access the knowledge base in order to obtain information on their courses. They carry out their search by typing free-text or keywords, while the system also supports problem-solving dialogues. When students wish to receive credit for their work, the project allows them to compare equivalent courses from CUBER compliant universities. On the one hand, It gives students a thorough automatic overview of the content of the courses, how tutors examine them, the number of their credits and the possible alternative optional modules. On the other hand, it helps educational institutions to manage the growing number of applications by extending their enrolment numbers. Although for the moment, the Federated European Virtual University is the forerunner in implementing this technology, other educational institutions, telecommunication and IP companies may also find the number of prospects it offers beneficial.