Open Distance Learning at Southern Switzerland Universities - A comprehensive and multilingual approach involving universities, teachers, students, and administration

The new universities of Italian speaking part of Switzerland are developing with high priority a multilingual open distance learning environment. Within the framework of the Virtual Campus Switzerland Programme we started three 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 university graduates. Furthermore we attach great importance to the media didactic aspects, the multi-linguality (the support of some courses will be available in different languages), and the social integration of open distance education (e.g. the influence of ODL on family life). Last but not least the communication structure of university administration will be analysed so that we may optimally adapt it to the new reality