Another Step towards a Virtual University in Construction It

Nine universities started a project in autumn 2001 with the aim to develop an interuniversity postgraduate program in Construction Information Technology. The program is intended to be offered to students on most of the partner universities. 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 the partner universities can offer in this specific area, but will also get the very important experience of other universities, countries and cultures, as well as of using IT in the learning and working process. Some partner universities, like University of Salford, already offer programmes in open distant learning mode. To extend the experiences 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 conceptualize 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 future Virtual University in Construction IT..