OPEN DISTANCE EDUCATION AT SOUTHERN SWITZERLAND UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES: SOME RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS

摘要

The new university of applied sciences of Italian speaking part of Switzerland (SUPSI) is developing a multilingual open distance learning environment. Within the framework of the Virtual Campus Switzerland Programme we are participating at several projects in order to set up a virtual campus with strong local roots and with closed relationships to other universities of Switzerland and of the close foreign countries. The main objective of these activities is to expand the offer of modular courses, to make them available anytime and anywhere for more interested people and thus to set-up a life long learning platform for continuous education. We attach great importance to the media didactic aspects, the multilinguality (the support of some courses will be available in different languages) and the integration of on-line courses into the existing master curricula offered, until now, only in face-to-face modality. For this reason, we started useful collaborations with other institutions with competence in didactical aspects and communication issues. The result of these collaborations is a strong partnership among institution of the same region with the main goal to establish a common open distance learning curricula.