Venus Project

Project Background

Objectives
VENUS aims to internationalise prestigious courses, with international scope and importance, in each member university through virtual mobility, open to both students and citizens. The content will focus on promoting European citizenship, collaboration and personal development.
VENUS aims to implement two different models of international virtual seminars (a seminar series during the academic year and a one-week summer school) and evaluate their sustainability.
VENUS aims to enhance international clusters of educational institutions each strongly embedded in regional networks, in order to stimulate inclusion of citizens. Through the elaboration of the contents on two levels (general European and region specific) the European identity will be enhanced and at the same time local aspects will be valued.
VENUS aims to become a world-class example of cross-border collaboration between higher education organisations, businesses and citizens. The overall objective is to create a sustainable best-practice example of the “Faculty of Extension”, extended both in the sense of methods and target public.

Approach
The organisational approach in VENUS is that each partner institution will select a topic that has a “European focus” and that contributes more in general to the education of all students, citizens and employees. Each partner invites internal or external top experts to deliver the seminar together with a content expert from within the own institution (the “local moderator”).
In order to reach a wide and diverse target audience, each partner will form an international and regional cluster by linking up with their own partners and networks (in the region and on an international level).The seminars will consist of 3 main parts: interactive preparatory activities, seminar delivery (presentation, localisation and debate), and interactive follow-up activities.

Expected results
The main outcomes of VENUS are sustainable models for creating a “Faculty of Extension” resulting from the well-balanced integration of European relevant content provided by experts and academics that are otherwise not reachable by the European Citizen, inclusion of foreign students, citizens and lecturers (physically or virtually), international and regional networks and the appropriate supportive forms of transmission and collaborative methods (videoconferences, wiki, platform, …).
We envisage the following particular outcomes: a virtual “Faculty of Extension” in each university, jointly developed training materials (including a modular Virtual Seminar Organisation Handbook), a documented strategy for Higher Education Institutions and their partners in education on how to successfully organise self-sustainable, high quality and certified virtual mobility schemes, an online module entitled “Europe in Focus” that contains recordings and learning materials that will be derived from the seminar series, the set-up of a sustainable virtual mobility scheme accepted in the mainstream educational offer of the partners and outside the partnership, and at least three training workshops for interested parties outside the partnership.

Co-ordinating institution
EuroPACE ivzw (BE)

Partner organisations
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven) (BE), Audiovisual Technologies, Informatics and Telecommunications bvba (ATiT) (BE), University of Cologne (DE), Teknillinen korkeakoulu, Koulutuskeskus Dipoli (Helsinki University of Technology, Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli) (FI), Nyugat-Magayarországi Egyetem, Geoinformatikai Foiskolai Kar, (University of West-Hungary, College of Geoinformatics) (HU), West Pomeranian Business School (PL), Technical University of Kosice - Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (SK), Consorzio Nettuno Network per l’Università Ovunque (IT)

Duration
24 months (Mar. 2006 – Feb. 2008)

Programme
DG Education and Culture - eLearning