Exploitable results A step closer towards a European Virtual University They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Federated European Virtual University is not as far away as one might think, and the innovations of the CUBER project bring it even closer to reality. CUBER has developed a system for classifying distance learning course modules in a machine-searchable way. Details of modules can be accessed regardless of the location of the Host University or language used. CUBER supports a course brokerage with which students can locate the course modules they want. Flexible learning and student mobility are central to the EU's vision of an integrated Europe. The idea is to accommodate, as far as is possible, all the barriers to learning: location, language, age, family commitments, work commitments, and so on. A notion that has been gathering momentum in recent years is that of the course brokerage, for students and institutions to see what courses are available. The central problem is to find a way of describing courses in a coherent way, taking into account all the educational attributes that enable students and academics make their choice. There are lots of course databases and repositories on the web. The trouble is that they are described heterogeneously. One of CUBER's innovations is a conceptual model that defines the essential concepts of the subject domain, together with their attributes and relationships to one another. The project has also devised an ontology that captures the definition of all the concepts in the conceptual model. Using an XML-based representation enables the information to be accessed by search engines. CUBER has developed the ontology and metadata schema based on LOM (Learning Object Metadata). The metadata schema covers such things as preparation time, how the course is delivered, teacher requirements, and more. The course broker system comprises three main elements, a knowledge base, authoring interface and search engine. The knowledge base currently has course details for 50 study programmes and over 500 courses that are offered by various European distance-learning universities in the subject domain of information technology. The ontology and metadata schema was designed so that it can be easily extended to other subject domains; the project restricted itself to the IT domain for budgetary reasons only. The authoring interface provides the means by which educational institutions maintain their entries on the knowledge base. Students use the search engine to access the knowledge base. It provides an 'exploration interface' according to individual educational and learning requirements, including free-text and keyword search, and conceptual content analysis based on expert-defined classification schemes. The search engine also supports problem-solving dialogues, where constraints such as location, time, preferred learning mode, etc. can be resolved iteratively. CUBER also provides an ECTS-based decision model for mutual recognition of course credits from CUBER-compliant universities. The methodology allows the equivalence of two courses to be checked automatically in terms of ECTS credits, placement of course in curriculum, examination method and course content. This automatic decision support provides a quick, fair and objective evaluation of course alternatives, and will help to handle the growing numbers of applications for places on courses. CUBER has the vision of a Federated European Virtual University, where resources and services of affiliated institutions could interact with one another. As a student, you will be able to design your own study programme, using a variety of courses from different institutions. All the necessary administrative information would be co-ordinated automatically because of the trusted relationship between institutions. The problems now are political ones, not technical ones. Promoted by the IST Results Service Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
