Testing Online Inter-Institutional Collaboration across the Globe: The Virtual Exchange Program.
(2019) Virtual Exchange. Borderless Mobility between the European Higher Education Area and Regions Beyond. — Location: Berlin (11.December.2019)
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- Abstract
- Since the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) Stakeholder Summit in Lausanne in 2013, several universities have expressed their interest in having MOOCs count for academic credit. Their idea was simple: allow students to take their already existing online courses from any participating university in the Virtual Exchange Program (VEP), partake in the exam at their own campus, and have the credits for that course count towards their academic degree program. In November 2017, 11 different universities signed a VEP agreement valid for the pilot phase of three years and based on four guiding principles: 1) Mutual trust between participating universities; 2) Small extra effort (use what we have); 3) Acceptance of different academic calendars; and 4) Use the same exam at each university. This paper presents the general framework of the VEP and the administrative lessons learned with the aim of inspiring others to set up similar collaborations. We discuss how the differences in the administrative contexts of our VEP partners have consequences for organizing exchange on course level. The structure of the paper reflects the structure of the VEP agreement: for each topic, we describe the original idea, the challenges we experienced during the implementation of the agreement, and how we plan to address these issues in the near future. After this topic-by-topic discussion, we end with a brief discussion of the lessons learned and future outlook.
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Helsdingen, A. S., Elkhuizen, G., Docq, F., & et al. (2019). Testing Online Inter-Institutional Collaboration across the Globe: The Virtual Exchange Program. Virtual Exchange. Borderless Mobility between the European Higher Education Area and Regions Beyond., Berlin. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/111359