Modeling the Virtual Campus

Abstract

The challenge facing TeleLearning and Distance Education is to support the essentially autonomous knowledge building process by the learner, while at the same time, emphasizing the very important collaborative dimension of learning. This challenge cannot be met without information technology and without the integration of all the useful synchronous and asynchronous technologies in a coherent architecture. We call such an architecture the Virtual Campus. A review of five LICEF's projects related to this architecture will be presented. Then, applying an object oriented modeling technique, we outline the modeling process, defining the actors of the Virtual Campus, their roles, the processes they are involved in and the computer tools they need to perform their roles. Upgrading tools and methods to support the Virtual Campus will open up and extend the traditional classroom in a very "real" way. It will hopefully contribute to learners persistence in distance education, thus extending the social and economic usefulness of TeleLearning