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Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC)
secção: Educação e Formação
Home > Education and Training > News > Meeting with the International Distance Learning Panel

Meeting with the International Distance Learning Panel

 - 15/01/2009

On 15th January 2009, the President of Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) met the international panel mandated by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education with conducting an assessment and coming up with recommendations on distance learning in Portugal, chiefly to reveal the backbone infrastructure aspects available for distance learning in Portugal after actions promoted by and with funding from Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and operated by the FCCN – Foundation for National Scientific Computation, which are currently forerunners in terms of what is happening in European countries:

  • High level of connectivity provided in the entire state higher education system, in private higher education member institutions and in all science and technology institutions by means of the IP communications network, through the RCTS – Science Technology and Society Network, with more than 70% of the higher education system (measured by the number of students enrolled) connected via the FCCN’s own fibre-optic cable operating at 10 Gbps.
  • Full b-on Knowledge Library Online texts available free and unrestricted throughout the state higher education system, in private higher education member institutions and in all science and technology institutions, with more than 14,750 international scientific publication titles, following subscriptions that were negotiated with international publishers in a “big deal” for the entire country.
  • Wireless access on all higher education institution campuses, as well as those private higher education member institutions of e-U: Campus Virtual which incorporates the various physical campuses of the higher education system into a virtual campus that is unified at national level. Under this system, a student or professor can access content he or she is entitled to while in any other higher education institution as if he or she were in her own institution by means of a national automatic identity authentication system, which was a groundbreaking project at worldwide level.
  • Online access in each state higher education institution, as well as those private higher education member institutions of e-U: Campus Virtual to learning content provided by professors of differing subjects on Moodle platforms and other e-Learning platforms. This range of distance learning content already constitutes a sizeable body of work.
  • Open access to RCAAP – Open Access Scientific Repository, which was developed in the second half of 2008 to integrate all of the scientific information and higher education institution open access repositories, with metadata and a built-in search system at national level, including dissertations, studies, reports and other texts. The intention is to expand this to all Portuguese scientific and higher education institutions.
  • Open access to Zappiens – High definition video repository and digital copyright management (site in Portuguese)
  • Video broadcasting (site in Portuguese) services provided by the FCCN.
  • Very high definition videoconferences (site in Portuguese) system involving higher education institutions.
  • Open biomedical health and research knowledge platform with content for differing groups, but also for medicine and nursing students, currently being developed in the scope of a collaboration with Harvard Medical School.
Last updated ( 16/07/2010 )