VISCED

The National Virtual Education conference in Finland was this year arranged for the 10th time. The Director General of The Finnish National Board of Education Mr Aulis Pitkälä opened the conference. His speech concentrated on national and international research results into the exploitation of ICT, which has not reached the desired level in Finland. He emphasised the point that in the near future, Finland has to concentrate on improving this exploitation as well as on teacher skills, usage of ICT in education and eMaterial. The international keynote speaker was Dr Anne Looney from the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment in Dublin.

A half day meeting of the VISCED International Advisory Committee took place on the morning of Wednesday 28 November in Berlin. The agenda for this final IAC meeting included a presentation and discussion about Key and Critical Success Factors for virtual schools and colleges. It also provided an opportunity to review teacher training and most importantly, policy challenges, opportunities and recommendations for the future in a session led by Barry Phillips the policy analyst at Sero. The traditional IAC dinner was held the evening before, with a new innovation of a Guest of Honour – in this case Professor Gilly Salmon, a leading international light in online learning.

Nikos Zygouritsas presented the VISCED project on the afternoon of the final day (Friday) of Online Educa in Berlin last week. In a session, chaired by Paul Bacsich, entitled “Distance Learning and the Virtual School”, Nikos described the project and its key case studies. Due to one presenter being unavailable there were just three presentations in the session and this allowed an extensive range of questions to Nikos and the other two presenters at the end. A large number of brochures and all the Handbooks that had been brought vanished off the desk at the end and Paul and Nikos were surrounded by people wanting more information. There were over 60 participants in the audience.

The VISCED Project partners are organising a webinar to present the main findings of the project on Monday 10 December at 15:00 CET. This one hour webinar will provide a summary of the main outputs of the project including a description of the status of virtual schools and colleges in Europe. It will also summarise a set of recommendations generated through the work of the partners related to how best to foster and encourage effective virtual schooling options for those who could best benefit from flexible alternatives to traditional schools and colleges.