"ORION" is a LEONARDO DA VINCI Pilot Project which aims to create a  'Virtual'  Marine Environment Department which can deliver Open and Distance Learning (ODL) courses in a variety of languages. ORION is linking university partners situated on the outer fringes of Europe: University of Stockholm in the north; University of Cork in the west; University of Algarve in the south; and is coordinated by the Institute of Marine Biology of Crete, even further to the south.
Other partners are the National Centre for Marine Science (Athens), the Federation of European Aquaculture Producers (Belgium) and TEREUS S.A. (Athens). 

THE GOALS OF ORION
The major goal is the development of a powerful state-of-the-art ICT (Information and Communication Technology) learning/teaching tool, to be used within a Virtual Learning Environment which will be delivered by means of a Distributed Network.
The subject area, the marine environment, covers fields relevant to both the vocational and tertiary sectors at different levels. Its multi-disciplinary scope includes aspects such as pollution studies, marine ecology, biodiversity and coastal zone management. This is an area of great importance within Europe and is subject to increasing legislative and regulatory demands that affect a range of coastal zone users and decision-makers.

LANGUAGE TRAINING
Training in languages has become an important issue in the drive to wards the Europe of Knowledge as defined in the decision taken by the European Council when it met in Lisbon in March 2000: "The European Union must become the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based community in the world by 2010". 

The LEONARDO DA VINCI project "ORION" comes at a particularly appropriate time, when convergence and harmonisation of the European Higher Education area are right at the top of the educational agenda. The strengths of the European Higher Education Area need to be made more visible to the world, in the present push towards the "globalisation of education", the phrase used by Commissioner Viviane Reding (responsible for Education and Culture) as she introduced the new
ERASMUS WORLD programme on July 17 2002.

However, countries whose languages are defined as falling into the "least widely used" category, such as Sweden, Portugal and Greece, may not benefit from the  reforms that are taking place within the Bologna Process. Although their universities and tertiary courses are recognised as excellent, their remoteness and their language may exclude them from taking advantage of these reforms.
In ORION, the latest innovative technology will be used to create a 'Virtual Learning Environment' in which language training will play a major role. Freely available language modules will be published on the public pages of the website covering basic English, Greek, Portuguese and Swedish; these will be based on the subject areas of marine environmental sciences.  It is hoped that such language training will also help those who are interested in present and future student exchanges, as well as supporting the portability of the online ODL courses.

COURSE PROVISION AND DEVELOPMENT
The multi-disciplinary course materials, prepared by top-level educators in English, Swedish, Portuguese and Greek, will be developed as innovative re-usable learning objects which can be shared and re-used by teachers and target group users situated in the remote areas of Europe. These course materials will be piloted by users from the university partners, and students currently studying at the partner universities. 

CREATION OF A REFERENCE RESOURCE REPOSITORY
The Virtual Learning Environment will be designed and produced by the Greek partner who is very experienced in designing online databases. It will house a Resource Repository for a glossary (available in the 4 languages treated by the project), the self-instruction language modules and relevant online works of reference, including bibliographies.

PROJECT RATIONALE
In certain remote areas of Europe the applied marine sciences play  a major economic role (i.e. fisheries and aquaculture) but formal education/training at all levels is needed. Hoewever, such remote areas are nearly always depopulated and where low numbers cannot justify the need for specialised courses. Educational disadvantage is a major factor in the high rates of depopulation of these rural and peripheral areas. ORION's major innovative objective is the creation of powerful new teaching/learning tools that are particularly suited to these needs, a task now achievable through the strengths of the fast-expanding ICT technologies.
These new learning tools are derived from some elements developed through the revolutionary growth of the Internet (Virtual Mobility and ICT) and which can now be harnessed for the benefit of education, in flexible and ODL courses with all their varieties of learning contexts.
A set of innovative learning tools, known as "re-usable learning objects" will be developed within the Virtual Learning Environment of ORION, with one main site and one mirror (or remote) site in each country,enabling the establishment of an integrated Europe-wide learning service.
The targeted geographic areas have, in addition to their problems of remoteness, the inherent isolation caused by their less widely used languages, a condition that can impose financial disadvantages exacerbated by their relatively small populations (Greek, Portuguese, Swedish). Each of these languages, although culturally very important, is often superseded by the widespread use of English for course dissemination, particularly in courses of a scientific nature.
The present proposal acknowledges the reality of the situation by

1. providing a glossary in all three languages, based on an English matrix,


2. providing ESP modules in marine environmental science to reflect the real-life situation and to aid content comprehension, and


3. providing basic self-tuition language modules in Greek, Swedish and Portuguese to aid student mobility.

Project information

• Project profile ORION (EL 2001 BP LA 114443)



• Start of project: 1/11/2001


• Duration : 36 months


• Funding 72% funded by the : LEONARDO DA VINCI programme

Ms. Margaret Eleftheriou

Institute of Marine Biology of Crete
PO Box 2214,
Heraklion 71003,
Crete - Greece

Telephone: +30 2 810 337815