Fifth six-monthly periodic report

Objectives and planned actions:

The educational multimedia courseware is an important application in the European Programmes. The advances in interactive simulations and virtual learning environments led to a new generation of educational applications based on multimedia tools.

The main objective of this WP is to help and accelerate our joining the network of the leading European institutions in this field. The activities in the WP are oriented towards experimentation of distributed teaching and learning facilities for co-operation between institutions. This will allow them to share teachers and students on all the possible levels as well as resources (e.g. courses, laboratories, etc.) and to apply common solutions for generic distributed learning services.

Video-conferencing is by now a well-known technology used also by the Commission and by many research facilities, but industrial entities are also catching up fast with this technique.

The objective is to accelerate our capability to use video-conferencing tools in our co-operation activities to spare travel-time, and spare resources. Our presently available pilot video-conferencing facilities need a harmonised upgrade to match the present and future needs. The upgraded environment will also allow tests to be performed for Community declared key actions, such as investigating tele-work, distance learning, virtual enterprise functions.

Additional objectives are to identify distribution policies and channels, planning and implementation of dissemination and exploitation actions throughout the project; technology transfer for SMEs

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