UNIVERSITY

A high-tech educational environment  

eCampus University is identifiable as a high-tech educational environment. In this sense, we integrated a traditional approach to academic training with a tangible variable, adding the third dimension of the new media to traditional languages, strategies and tools (books and paleotechnologic devices such as overhead projectors). However, the fact that new media allow for different educational approaches (including distance learning) poses two central questions to the pedagogical reflection and the educational systems currently in use:

• multimediality, which is determined by the co-existence of analogue media (cinema, television) and digital media (computers, videodiscs);
• interactivity, which improves, yet complicates the communicative relationships peculiar to the educational environment, introducing technology as a conduit between student and professor.

The risk is that these two dimensions will be taken as technological artifices whose aim is to make the transmission of knowledge a simple affair, reducing education to a mere transaction of information.  

In this regard, eCampus University believes that multimedia and interactivity are both functions of the educational environment, contributing to a final result of meaningful and concrete learning.

This new didactic environment encourages the establishment of a new system of relations between students and professors, dominated by a single organizing principle which is the basis of the three dimensions of the education area (namely the language dimension, the media dimension, and the teaching/learning strategies applied). However, it is still up to them to decide the sense and add value the educational pathway.

We identify ourselves with Henri Dieuzeide's thought: In order to be effective the new medias require the inclusion of creativity and pedagogical imagination. Therefore, technology must not be employed as an alleged shortcut for the simplification of the learning process.

Therefore, the online university denomination is not meant to be understood in its weak sense, almost as if it were only a matter of elaborating and distributing a more or less complex and complete catalogue of television programs and/or multi-derivative design media. Instead, by online university we mean a high-tech educational environment, which realizes autonomous and remotely accessible training and didactic solutions, integrated with tutoring and teaching activities, implemented by an individual educational source. In this vision, instructional design, psycho-pedagogical research, and interaction with the user are the result of a uniquely conceived method integrated into an organic educational offer.

By new technologies (Dieuzeide) we mean technologies characterized by speed in recording, storage power and representation of information; interactivity in the manipulation of data; possibility of deploying information even over great distances (computer, videodisc, telematics).

The actions for the realization of a technological educational environment

eCampus University aims to establish a real technological educational environment through the following actions:  

• Systematic monitoring of the demand for higher education and the needs of actual and potential users;
• systematic monitoring of the socio-economic environment and labour market in order to develop appropriate educational offers;
• centralized monitoring of the instructional design, control of the educational processes and their evaluation;
• creation of an e-learning platform arising directly from the users' educational needs, already present in the design stage and not adapted at a later stage; the technical structure responsible for the design and management of the platform is the E-Learning Service Center provided for in the statute of the University;
• basic and applied learning research activities, through the eCampus Foundation's Learning Research Center, which will also have support functions for the general and specific educational system.
• establishment of a Permanent Didactic Committee in order to promote high-quality teaching and certify the teaching material provided and the services offered;
• selection and placement of highly skilled teaching staff, willing to share methods and objetives with the University;
• employment of advance tutoring, with the aim to support the learning process but also to orientate and introduce the students into the labour market; 
• reduction of the dispertion (negative results, drop-outs, renounces) through a strong personalization of the teaching;
• maximisation of the use of the structural, didactic and logistical material of the Novedrate headquarters not only for the provision of the telematic services, but also for the periodic and final exams taken in presence. The Novedrate headquarters have more then sufficient structures for both purposes: directional and administrative offices, areas destined for technological hardware and for multimedia departments, offices for the professors, traditional and multimedial classrooms, library, auditoriums, restaurants, coffee bars, sports facilities, 270 accommodations for professors, students and tutors;
• activation of workshops and seminars with the professors at the headquarters at a particolar moment of the formative path, at the student's discretion.
• realization of scientifical and cultural events integrating the educational offer.

Who is the University addressed to?

We would like to highlight the fact that eCampus Online University aims at a specific target: the youth (interested in humanistic, juridical, socio-economic, technical-scienific education) but also employed or unemployed figures who aim to improve their professional skills or to change their professional career. Foreign students can also enroll in eCampus online University, as long as they fulfill the requirements provided by the current legislation.

eCampus University organizes actual academic courses for all those candidates who choose to follow its methodologic and didactic project or for all those who for work, residence, and health-related reasons cannot participate on an ongoing basis to lectures and other presential activities. Furthermore, the University offers flexible learning processes for the continuous, recurring and permanent formation of the adults. (art. 2/2 of the Statute)

eCampus telematic University, in accordance with the rules provided for in the Inter-Ministerial Decree issued on 17 April 2003, interprets creatively, within the context of the learning methodologies and technologies applied, the spirit of the regulation which aims to defend the rights and the duties related to the education, interpreting instruction as a growth factor, aimed at the personal and social developement, to the cultural belonging of the addressees.

The aim of eCampus telematic University is simply not that of producing degree courses, but rather to train people who are capable of learning, also thanks to the new technologies available.