"ORION", a LEONARDO DA VINCI is a 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 can be visited at www.orionnet.info.

The 5th Newsletter reports the progress and developments of ORION - for details on its objectives, please see the first ORION Newsletter. The interim progress reports are covered in the complete series of newsletters which can be visited by going to this linked page.

ORION MEETINGS and PROGRESS

ORION Partners' Meeting delay

The 4^th  Partners' Meeting of the ORION project was postponed until June 2004 due to problems with finalisation of the Interim Report . At this point, the University of Algarve hosted the next partners' project meeting in Faro from June 1st-5th 2004.

Meeting

The following documents are available by clicking on the links indicated:

1. Agenda for the FARO meetings
2. Minutes of the Partners, Steering Group, Management Meetings held in Faro

The blazing summer weather and the good progress of the project did little to lift the spirits of the ORION partners, as they met in Faro for the 4th Partners' Meeting.

A full account of the mainly bureaucratic obstacles can be read in the Minutes.

The Steering Group had to take decisions as whether the ORION deliverables could be produced within the very tight schedule imposed by the inability to achieve a time extension for completion of the project. Nevertheless, the partners confirmed their commitment to the project with a very real degree of warmth and enthusiasm for the quality of the products. This very complex pilot project had acheived outcomes well beyond expectations, combining:

1. 4 self-tuition language modules, in English, Greek, Portuguese, Swedish
2. A Resource Repository with several searchable databases
3. An innovative distributed network remotely accessed with custom-designed software to create re-usable academic courses in several languages
4. A glossary of 1200 items, in 4 languages - with instant translation facilities for three less widely-used languages.

Decisions were therefore taken to go full steam ahead throughout the summer to try to meet the deadlines, and to go ahead with external evaluations procedures already agreed on.

Website

The website continued to attract visitors : in 2004, up to the end of May, there had been 2206 visitors who had consulted 6875 pages. Overall, since the dedicated site opened on Sept. 8 2003, there had been in total 6396 visitors who had consulted 13, 868 pages.

Glossary

The glossary was running well to target and was likely to meet its projected date of September 2004. Almost all the translation had been completed and the programming was well in hand.

Courses remotely accessed

All but one of the courses were online, using the Weekly type of setting. The Tropical Ecology course uses the topic-based model, and will be online on a dedicated website during August.

Evaluation

Evaluators (names as suggested in the last meeting) have been approached and will start work at the end of August and throughout September. Their evaluations will be made public on this website.

Dissemination

FEAP has undertaken to prepare a short 4-page pamphlet for distribution in the dissemination activities planned for August and September - this version can be downloaded here.

Site Visit

On the final day, the project members were able to visit the installations of the Marine Centre of the University of the Algarve at Faro - some selected pictures of the installations are included below.

ORION people

Christos Hapsiades, Technical Director and member of the Board of TEREUS S.A., Athens, has been working in Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) since before it became a buzzword.

After graduating from Athens TEI in 1983 (School of Public Relations and Advertising) he made information technology his speciality. He worked for several Athens firms, before coming to Crete to work at the Apple Centre, Heraklion. He was employed as a developer and systems supporter for Y.S.T.E. Ltd and Stirixis S.A. from 1989-1994. In 1994 he was recruited by IMBC to be its lead developer in the Information Design and Development Department (IDD) which was an innovative support system dedicated to finding new ways to present scientific information to specialist target audiences. Mr Hapsiades was the senior Programmer responsible for the development of Internet and Intranet applications, design and development of IMBC Web sites, the development of Client-Server applications and the development of Multimedia applications, including the Department's growing CD-ROM list: AQUALEX (published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd), BIAQUE (Bibliography in Interactions of Aquaculture and the Environment), Spotlight on Greek Marine Science,(Greek Ministry of Research & Development promotional CD-ROM for LISBOA 98), POSEIDON (NCMR promotional video of POSEIDON project.

Since 2001 Mr Hapsiades has been with Deal-fx S.A., and its relaunch as TEREUS Infosystems S.A, Athens, where he manages a group of application developers and web developers, is responsible for defining the technological framework of operations, software architecture design and implementation, and the supervision and management of software projects, of which ORION is one.