"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 links 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).

This project is developing an individual  website for the ORION project - www.orionnet.info - which demonstrates how technical courses can be delivered using web services.

The website operates on two levels.

1. The first level contains all the publicly available material concerning the project; the basic language learning modules, some of the freely available resource materials, and the electronic newsletters. Visitors may register in order to receive the electronic ORION newsletter. Published Newsletters can be seen on the menu bar on the right of thise page.
2. The second level is restricted to students registered at the partner universities. and this level contains course materials as well as the second level language modules. These courses will not be ready for use until the autumn of 2003.

ORION LANGUAGE LEARNING

The ORION online Pilot courses in Màrine Environmental Science play an active and innovative role in promoting language learning. The Language courses section includes the basic self-learning modules in English, Greek, Portuguese and Swedish. These modules are based on marine environmental science subject areas, and are intended to help students from the partner universities to access course materials in all partner languages. The aim is to help promote linguistic diversity in language learning. To further facilitate language learning, the website contains the AQUALEX glossary which gives instant access to definitions of marine science terms, in the four partner languages.

ORION ONLINE COURSES

There are at present seven modules, with two more expected to be up and running before December 2003. These have been designed on a share and re-use basis which allows course tutors complete freedom to update materials as and when necessary.

ORION RESOURCES

The Reference Resource Centre houses the varied resources utilised by the project but also functions as an online Library with all the bibliographic and reference facilities provided by the partnership. These include a glossary in 9 languages, English, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish. There is also a specialised bibliograpy, concerning aquaculture and the environment (formerly BIMAQUE), which includes more than 800 new references to chemical pollutants.