In Finland, the project calls for English-language cases/implementations from Universities of Applied Sciences, which are then paired with a corresponding international case. The case can be an entirely virtual course or a part or a module of a course.

The nine elements of authentic learning proposed by Herrington and Oliver (2000) will be applied in authentic learning benchmarking (see also Herrington and Herrington, 2006 and www.uow.edu.au/~janh/Kokkola/:

1. Provide authentic context that reflects the way the knowledge will be used in real life
2. Provide authentic activities and tasks
3. Provide access to expert performances and the modelling of processes
4. Provide multiple roles and perspectives
5. Support collaborative construction of knowledge
6. Promote reflection
7. Promote articulation
8. Provide coaching and scaffolding
9. Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks.

The benchmarking method has three phases and includes asynchronous and synchronic interaction.

• Benchmarking pairs familiarise themselves with the comparative evaluation material in advance in the Ning environment. There will be an opportunity to become familiar with each other's course implementation online (or virtually).
• The virtual benchmarking session is implemented in Acrobat Connect Pro. A teacher or teachers present their course, after which their partner comments using the criteria. The case is then discussed by all participants.
• A 'post mortem' discussion continues in Ning
  Concurrently, a benchmarking process implemented as virtual sessions and by application of social media will be developed in this project.

For those teaching eLearning courses in English and interested in comparing them with those of Finnish teachers of Universities of Applied Sciences, please contact Leena Vainio at HAMK University of Applied Sciences eLearning Centre.