The Role of Mobile Learning in European Education
Project Partners
The partnership is carefully balanced between a telecommunications multinational corporation, a European association based in Belgium, a leading European university, a not-for-profit educational foundation which is a European leader in distance education, e-learning and mobile learning, a research foundation and a university-business foundation.
Geographically the partnership is well balanced with one representative from North Western Europe (Ireland), two from Southern Europe (Portugal and Bulgaria), two from the new accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary and Bulgaria), one from Central Europe (Belgium) and one from Northern Europe (Norway).
The structure and functioning of cooperation and communication within the partnership are as follows. The project Board of Management consists of :
Mrs Judy Nix (Ericsson) Ireland (Chair)
Mr Support (The European Consortium for the Learning Organisation) Belgium
Professor Torstein Rekkedal (NKI) Norway
Sna Ana Dias (TecMinho) Portugal
Dr András Gábor (The Information Technology Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Hungary
Professor Nevena Mileva (University of Plovdiv) Bulgaria
The Board of Management will be charged with:
Setting schedules, workloads and deadlines for the work of each partner
Establishing quality control measurements for all products and processes
Monitoring budget expenditure against targets
Exercising quality control and approval of all interim and final reports and products.
The project Board of Management will meet 3 times a year in the countries of the partners.
Ericsson Education (Ireland) | Ericsso globally. Education services were delivered in 110 countries in 2005 by Ericsson Education Ireland with 48,288 training days being delivered which is 17% of Ericsson Education's business globally. Global responsibility is held for eBusiness Solutions which incorporates eLearning, Virtual Classroom Training, mLearning and Learning Management Services Ericsson Education Ireland is a European leader in mobile learning. It was the contracting partner and administrator of the two Leonardo da Vinci projects, From elearning to mlearning and Mobile learning: the next generation of learning. It was a founder member of the World Mobile Learning Alliance and has organized two international conferences in mobile learning in Dublin, one in September 2003 and the other in September 2005. Ericsson has extensive experience of transnational cooperation through its role as contracting partner in a series of Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates Minerva projects, giving it experience of working harmoniously with institutions of all kinds from all parts of Europe. |
The Information Technology Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Hungary) | The Information Technology Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA-ITF) is a non-profit making organisation which has been endowed by, in line with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the KFKI Computer Systems Corporation in 1992. The Foundation is supervised by the Board of Founders. The Board comprises representatives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), the National Committee for Technological Development (OMFB) as well as the KFKI Computer Systems Corp. The activities of the Foundation are managed by the Director of the Foundation who employs full-time IT professionals with wide experience and reputation in information system engineering, strategic planning, business analysis, project management and on other informatics and information technology related fields. The mission of the Foundation is to advance the Hungarian IT industry in order to make it more conform to the European requirements. In the framework of this primary objective, the Foundation
In order to carry out the above main activities as well as to maintain the necessary operating conditions, the MTA Information Technology Foundation is legally allowed to undertake contractual works.
The main purpose is to support services in the fields of innovation and deliver continuous training and strategic information. TecMinho support training and employment in the North of Portugal. The organisation specialises in human resources training, electronic information services and development of multimedia courseware. TecMinho is promoting different investigation projects related to internet based learning, multimedia technology validation and to e-learning. It runs a continuous programme of courses for SMEs and adult education. TecMinho has a staff membership of 100.
TecMinho has been the contracting partner for a series of projects funded by the Portguese governments and by the European Commission Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates programmes. It was the lead partner in the CISAER and WEB-EDU e-learning projects, in which a number of the institutions in this project were partners. A listing of recent project organisation is given here: 2000 Leonardo da Vinci (P/00/C/F/RF-92553) Web-edu – Web Education Systems 2002 Leonardo da Vinci (L/02/B/PP-122003) DIPS – Distance learning approach to intellectual property rights 2004 Leonardo da Vinci II (DG Education and Culture) WASTE TOOL 2004 Innovation (DG Enterprise and Industry) IRC Portugal 2004 Interreg IIIc (DG Regional Policy) RUISNET |
NKI Bekkestua (Norway) | NKI is one of the largest nongovernmental educational institutions in Scandinavia. The NKI Group is organised as a non-profit foundation comprising NKI Distance Education, The Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH), The Business Training Centre (NA) and NKI Publishing House.
It has approximately 300 full-time and 700 part-time employees. The group’s head office is situated in Oslo, and there are district offices in 15 other cities. Altogether the NKI Group has each year a total of around 5,000 full-time and 25,000 part-time students NKI Distance Education (NKI) offers both traditional distance education programs and online programs via the Internet College. Altogether, this comprises approximately 150 programmes and more than 450 courses at secondary and undergraduate levels, as well as special Analysis, Evaluation, Recommendation; WebEdu and is at present leading the ‘Megatrends in e-learning project’. NKI has a main goal of offering online distance education adapted to students’ needs for flexibility. Mobile learning is an important aspect of satisfying the needs of adult learners. For this reason it has participated in the two mobile learning projects listed above, and developed considerable expertise in mobile learning. The NKI Research Department has considerable expertise in pedagogy, educational research and online education systems development and experience from e-learning and mobile learning pilot projects.
NKI has advanced competencies in the field of mobile learning and is a European leader in the field. The main pedagogical concepts of developing mobile learning for PDAs were solved by NKI in the Leonardo da Vinci project From e-learning to m-learning, in which a comfortable didactic environment was created by using Microsoft Reader Works, providing each student with Microsoft Reader software to display the content and which was adjudged highly satisfactory by surveys of students who had studied a full course by mobile learning on a PDA. The full course of text and readings measured 1000 A4 pages and was easily held by the memory of a standard PDA like the HP Compaq iPaq 5000 series. NKI was also a partner with Ericsson in the Mobile Learning: the Next Generation of Learning project.In this project NKI produced a world first by producing mobile learning versions of all 400 of its e-learning courses. |
University of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) | The University of Plovdid is one of Bulgaria’s largest universities situated in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city. There are eight faculties of the University of Physics, Mathematics and IT, Chemistry, Biology, Economics and Social Sciences, Law, Languages and Literature, Education. The University has a firm commitment to the use of technology in education and has extensive technology facilities. 900 lecturers and staff work at the university and of the 550 lecturers 30 are full professors, 163 associate professors, 230 PhD, 360 assistant professors. Over 8 thousand full-time students and some 5 thousand part-time students receive their training at the university. |
ECLO - European Consortium for the Learning Organisation (Belgium) | ECLO is a non profit making organisation registered in Belgium. ECLO operates as a multi-national network of companies, universities, NGOs and consultants with a common theme of learning. Learning in this context covers multiple disciplines including coaching and mentoring, e-learning, Knowledge Management, management and employee development, industrial regeneration etc.
As a network we have, or have had, members in all European countries and also Australia, India, China and Canada. Every year we run a conference in a different European city, the most recent of which have bee and the evaluation of eLearning. DEIS is well placed for this role as much of the literature written by DEIS is evaluative in nature, and as it will be external to the project so it can play the role of an external evaluator. Other institutions who will participate without receiving support from the Socrates grant are :
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