Researchers from Spanish, English, Turkish and Lithuanian centers will meet in Asturias starting on Monday to establish the bases for the UbiCamp project.
The new technologies revolutionize the concept of academic mobility and overcome the barriers of traditional e-learning. This is the goal of UbiCamp, an initiative led by the University of Oviedo and which also has the collaboration of the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), the Vytautas Magnus University and the Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), and the University of Yașar (Turkey). The objective of UbiCamp is to provide an integrated solution to the geographical barriers that academic mobility imposes on students, teachers and researchers.
Starting today, Monday, researchers from the five universities will meet in Asturias to establish the bases of this initiative, which will allow students to have a virtual Erasmus and take certain subjects from foreign centers.
UbiCamp has been chosen by the European Commission from more than 400 projects and has a budget of 438.000 euros within the Erasmus program. The initiative will be active until 2015, when the last group of students will finish their virtual mobility programs.
The UbiCamp project will be built upon a platform that will let students enroll in a part of their studies in the center of their choosing. Apart from allowing them to access strictly academic content, the platform will offer them a series of dynamic and attractive digital contents that will bring the student closer to the culture and traditions of the country of the hosting university. The student will not have to pass an examination of these contents, although accessing and viewing them will be compulsory. UbiCamp, thus, aims at enriching and supplementing the otherwise exclusively academic education of the student.
The pilot program for the virtual Erasmus will be set in motion during the second semester of the next academic year, or, in other words, in January 2014. More than 30 students from the Degrees of Pedagogy and Software Engineering will be the first to try the experience of the virtual mobility. The goal of UbiCamp is that more than a hundred students of the University of Oviedo are able to take advantage of the virtual mobility once the project has been fully implemented.
The bases and methodology may be seen at the official website of the project.
