Distance Education Centre at Gdansk University of Technology
in PHARE and Leonardo da Vinci Programme

Anna Grabowska

Distance Education Centre at Technical University of Gdansk, Poland

1. DECTUG - PHARE perspective.

The Distance Education Centre at Technical University of Gdansk (DECTUG) is a special unit dedicated to the development and delivery of courses offered in ODL mode. It was established by the Rector of the TUG on 30th April 1997 and with EU funds support (Phare Multi-country Programme for Distance Education, 1998-1999). The main objective of the Distance Education Centre is to give the possibility to students and staff of the TUG to access through the Internet study materials, correspondence lessons, scripts and communication environments. DECTUG is also responsible for developing distance education course modules and adaptation of existing European Union distance education course modules suitable for local delivery. The courses delivered by DECTUG are mainly Internet based. Course materials are published on the web and students and tutors communicate by e-mails or through newsgroups. Students come both from inside and outside University. This includes students from partner institutions and independent people willing to take part in some courses. Most of DECTUG staff consists of people that are contracted for specific tasks, they are not full time employees. Their responsibilities cover mainly management and technical support. Course preparation and tutoring is done by subject experts hired only for the duration of the given course.

Throughout the four years of the Phare Multi-country Programme, DECTUG was involved in different projects, including the set up of an operational Open and Distance Learning Study Centre. Other projects concentrated on the development of Distance Learning Course Modules in environmental field. The centre was also involved in a distance course called Learning about Open Learning (LOLA)The experiences gained during the implementation of the PHARE Multi-country Programme in Distance Education were very useful. Several ODL courses developed during the programme framework are still delivered through our web site ( http://www.dec.pg.gda.pl/). However, it should be stressed that the lack of tutors is a serious constraint in offering the course for commercial use. At present the courses delivered are "AutoCAD for beginners", "English for Environmental Awareness" and "TeleCAD".

Since 1998/1999 DECTUG has been involved in four Leonardo da Vinci projects:

• TeleCAD - Teleworkers Training for CAD Systems Users (1998-2001).
• MDEC - Multimedia Distance English Courses for Polish Users in Legal, Banking and Finance, Science and Technology, and Safety Training Sectors with Elements of European Union Regulations and Standards (1998-2001).
• AYTEM - Accompanying a Young Teacher into Educational Market by Distance Course Mode (1998-2001).
• LINGUAWEB - LinguaWeb for Small and Medium Enterprises (1999-2001).

TeleCAD - Teleworkers Training for CAD Systems Users project consists of:

• developing dedicated platform in the Internet for project developers (for management purpose, exchanging ideas, developing the project contents, monitoring the results),
• developing training methodology for teleworkers working with CAD systems on a basis of experiences of partners involved in the project and results of research in this field,
• developing dedicated platform in the Internet for teleworkers,
• developing electronic-based teaching materials (CD-ROM),
• developing the special guides for tutors and learners in English and in national languages,
• delivery of example courses for teleworkers working with CAD systems for different target groups (university students in Poland, post secondary students in Italy, young workers in Finland and Greece).

There are the following organisations involved in the project:

• Technical University of Gdansk (TUG), Poland,
• ARGO s.r.l. Formare I'Europa, Italy,
• IDEC, Greece,
• ZEUS, Greece,
• Pekkala Software Oy, Finland,
• Young Digital Poland, Poland.

MDEC - Multimedia Distance English Courses for Polish Users in Legal, Banking and Finance, Science and Technology, and Safety Training Sectors with Elements of European Union Regulations and Standards is aimed to fostering the development of methods of self-training at the workplace, and open and distance learning and training, in particular to facilitate access to continuing vocational training. The supporting activities are oriented at developing linguistic skills as part of vocational training. These courses are planned to be used for teaching students at universities, in continuing education institutions and will be disseminated into other groups of users. The project is a combination of development of information and communication technology and providing a solution for enhancement of worker's qualification in the era of information society. The project is based on advanced ICT technology (WWW, e-mail, multimedia).

The final product of this project consists of:

• Software system for Distance Education,
• Educational package for English learning.

Educational package is in the form of six multimedia specialised English course modules placed in the web. The courses are following:

• General English,
• Legal English,
• Banking English,
• Internet Technology,
• Science and Technology,
• Occupational Safety.

The courses are designed for university students to be used in the first phase as an addition to traditional courses and in the long term included in the curriculum.

AYTEM - Accompanying a Young Teacher into Educational Market by Distance Course Mode project aim is to provide young and old teachers with training, allowing them to improve their methods based on new ideas and experiences of colleagues from different parts of their countries and the world. The project provides a course materials for teachers and a platform the course delivery. It also trains tutors in partner countries. There are 10 partners organisations from 6 countries involved in the project development:

• Kaunas University of Technology - Lithuania,
• Vytautas Magnus University - Lithuania,
• Panevezys Regional Teachers Education Centre - Lithuania,
• Mazeikiai Education Centre - Lithuania,
• Ministry of Education and Science - Lithuania,
• University of Oulu - Finland,
• Nordic Folk Academy - Sweden,
• Odense Technical College - Denmark,
• Technical University of Gdansk - Poland,
• Jozsef Attila University - Hungary.

The educational CD ROM has been developed and Web Based Training environment Luvit is used for the course delivery.

LINGUAWEB - LinguaWeb for Small and Medium Enterprises project is aimed to foster co-operation between small and medium businesses based in different regions of Europe. This can be achieved by providing the interested companies with information about the local culture, society and language. The project implements and validates a Lingua Web Service providing:

• Information about local/regional language variants and authentic samples.
• Authentic multimedia documents from local/regional business, society and culture-related communication contexts.
• Demonstration modules for business, society and culture-embedded language learning extensions.

The Lingua Web Service addresses the communication and language training needs of SMEs in European business contexts. In the lifetime of the project, it will be developed and evaluated as a prototype for 4 languages (English, German, Irish and Polish) involving "chamber of commerce" type institutions in Germany, Ireland and Poland. There are the following organisations involved in the project:

• Ebehard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany,
• LINK Institut für Linguistik ind Interkulterelle Kommunikation, Germany,
• CTS Cormorant Telematic Systems, Ireland,
• Distance Education Centre at Technical University Gdansk, Poland.

3. Summary.

The TeleCAD pilot course was considered to analyse the performance of the example DE course delivered by DECTUG. In the first pilot course, in order to train the local tutors, 16 people from Greece (5), Finland (2), Italy (2) and Poland (7) took part. The course lasted from October 2000 to June 2001. The final evaluation was done by marking individuals and collecting the questionnaire results. It should have been stressed that only 30% of the participants were successful and were given the TeleCAD certificate.

During the discussion with the project partners the following findings were gathered:

• For some of the participants English language was a barrier in the learning process.
• The participants from partners' organisations did not have enough basic ICT skills and they were not motivated enough to play the tutors' role in the future.
• Web Based Training (WBT) environment requires reliable Internet connection. While it is possible the Intranet solution is recommended.
• The pilot course tutors who are responsible for the introduction to WBT environment should have been aware about facilitating actions which are crucial for the whole learning process performance.

The TeleCAD course was also delivered as an optional for 30 students from the Civil Engineering Department of the Technical University of Gdansk. Due to communication in Polish language and also due to personal involvement of students and local tutors 90% students have been awarded certificates.

Finally it should be stressed that after the end of the Phare Multi-country Programme in Distance Education, DECTUG is well equipped as far as hardware and software are concerned. On the other hand in order to achieve the success in ODL the major challenge for our network is building up competent human resources and utilising the projects results achieved.

4. References.

About Author.

Mrs Anna Grabowska (Ph.D.) is a Head of Distance Education Centre at Technical University of Gdansk (Poland). 

More info about author at - http://www.dec.pg.gda.pl/~blanka/DECperson.html.

E-mail: blanka@pg.gda.pl.