European joint program in construction IT – early experiences

In autumn 2001 nine universities started a project with the aim to develop an interuniversity postgraduate program in Construction IT. The program will be offered to students on most of the partner universities, and on some of them it should start already in the academic year 2003/2004. The students will attend the subjects in different ways: face to face at home universities, face to face at partner universities, as well as by means of open and distant learning. The program has been developed with the purpose that students will not only get the best subjects, but will also get the very important experience of other universities and cultures, and of using IT in the learning and working process. Some partner universities, like University of Salford, already got experiences in distant learning. To extend them and to try more, mostly videoconferencing technologies, TU Dresden and University of Maribor joint two classes of students in the early 2003 and run a 30 hour seminar on “Mobile Computing in Construction.” Valuable observations have been taken, which were then used to design an ideal distant learning environment. The paper describes the background, the teaching experiment itself, the observations made, and the specification of an integral distant learning environment, as a framework of a Virtual University in Construction IT.