The Kaleidoscope Telearn & VDS initiatives Professor Pierre Tchounikine University of Le Mans, France

Telearn Open Archive initiative

 Free access to scientific publications for everybody from everywhere  Easy deposit of published or unpublished materials  Sustainable repository (more reliable then personal “home pages”) Open archive basic principles

 Defragmenting local / disciplinary archives  Different disciplines  Different cultures  Different materials  PDF Documents  Videos  Technology assets  Bibliographical descriptions  Different languages  issue / metadata  Hosted by an external organization Kaleidoscope Telearn archive

 Weapon against plagiarism  Impact of a paper uploaded on an OA is three to four times its impact without it (?)  Many publishers are supportive to the OAI  Possibility to stamp documents  Quality stamps  Organization stamps  Etc. Open Archive FAQ

VDS initiative (Virtual Doctoral School)

Virtual Doctoral School: objectives 1.PhD learning activities and resources 2.a technological platform to support an integrated academic life and promote collaboration within PhD students 3.an integration with existing practices and an institutional recognition promote community building among PhD Students and senior researchers

Learning activities  Cognitive approaches to media based learning (course) 11 PhD from 7 different countries  Script approaches in CSCL (workshop) 14 PhD students from 5 different countries  Role of ICT in argumentation in science (workshop) 15 PhD students from 6 different countries  (…) 5-7 events / year Organized by several labs

Resources  List of doctoral schools  List of learning activities from Kal Universities  Outputs from the organized learning activities  Outputs from Kal content-based activities  Review of literature  …

The platform documents page

The platform PhD members page

Lessons learned  Major interest for the VDS concept  effective integration  integration in the long-term (via PhD students)  scientific interest in sharing top-level courses  …  Major difficulties  PhD education is very different in different countries / different disciplines  national requirements  document-based courses / interactive workshops  …

Towards sustainability  An entity that networks a set of European Universities and takes the best from its networked members to create top-level PhD students  A set of opportunities that Ph.D. students could benefit from within the context of, and subject to the constraints of, their local institutions (not a common programme)  Brokering existing learning activities and creating collaboratively new ones  A flexible structure  No burden  No “standardization”  Different uses: punctual use, long-time agreements, curricula Issues: quality insurance, recognition (ECTS, etc.), …