Sheffield (UK), March 2012 - The European project VISCED focuses on the transnational appraisal of virtual school and college provision. Partners in the VISCED project are making an inventory of innovative ICT-enhanced learning initiatives for the 14-21 age group in Europe.
This entails a systematic review at international and national levels, including a study into operational examples of fully virtual schools and colleges. The outputs of this work will be analysed and compared to identify relevant parameters and success factors for classifying and comparing these initiatives.
This initiative is open to researchers and policy makers, and all outputs will be published on the VISCED project wiki.
A project featured by VISCED is a distanceLearning initiative run by the Finnish City of Turku. It collects and spreads good practices on distance learning; collaborates with various distanceLearning projects, developers and creators; forms new kinds of networks; and creates new operation models to support a range of distanceLearning needs. The project also carries out research into how different types of learning materials suit distance learning and how to distribute data nationally and, to the extent appropriate, internationally.
The project covers all general education and also collects good practices from vocational education and basic art education. The University of Turku works with other project partners to produce nationally valid reports on distanceLearning solutions. The project started in September 2010 and continues until the end of 2012. It is mainly financed by Finland's National Board of Education and is coordinated by the City of Turku's educational system.
