Institutionalised Partnership
project on Promotion of Multimedia and Virtual Reality Technologies
in Education(MVIRT). 
Needs:
The
major part of St. Petersbutg Universities are still isolated fromthe world
academic society (especially those which field is not computerscience).
No money for new journals, conference attendence and exchanges.Internet
is still too expensive and not-accessible in common work at workplaces.Though
faculty and students are urgently interested to be involved in theInternet
community in order to get state- of-art information, prepare onlinecourses,
study new technologies etc.
Objectives:
MVIRT
IP project aims to create joint Virtual City for students of Switzerlandand
Russia as a certain WWW site. The visitor of Virtual City can "walk"along
the streets of Virtual City; come into virtual Museums and Universitiesfrom
both real countries; come into private houses of Swiss or Russianfamilies
located at the same street of Virtual City; acquire new friends,hear their
"Hello", know about cultural traditions of other peoplesfrom
other countries. And even more - a visitor of Virtual City has a possibilityto
build his own virtual building together with multimedia presentation(text+pictures+video+audio
) about his School, or Museum, or private houseand to place that virtual
building somewhere on the streets of VirtualCity to make it open for any
other visitor of Virtual City. In additionto WWW site there planned to
press quarterly a CD ROM with the currentversion of Joint Virtual City
and with more intensive video and audio thanon WWW.
Priorities:
- to allow faculty and students to use Internet for
their professional activity, e.g. create and serve personal homepages,
navigate via WWW, create online courses, use e-mail and new learning environment
etc.;
- to develop joint electronic space for students of
both countries to exchange with information, ideas, every day questions;
- to provide students with a possibility to study multimedia,
virtual reality technology, telecommunications, foreign languages by means
of direct participation in fascinating process of construction of joint
Virtual City.
Workplan:
- re-eqiupment of two PC-classes in St.Petersburg with
new communication and multimedia facilities ( we have some equipment, communications,
software but not sufficient ffor the MVIRT project);
- training of the staff and faculty in Switzerland (5-10
programmers/engineers plus 5-10 professianal trainers from St.Petersburg);
- preparation of 3-5 days courses for students "Introduction
to Virtual Reality in Internet";
- launching of training and consulting activity for
St.Petersburg Universities;
- monitoring and evaluation;
- promotion and expansion of the project to other universities.
Evaluation Scheme:
Evaluation
may include different forms of questionnaires and interviewsof the students
after 3-5 days of hand-on courses in Internet.
Target Population:
University
faculty, students, post-graduate students, school teachers.
Budget:
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