E-LEARNING: A KEY TOOL FOR EDUCATIONAL COOPERATION WITH UNIVERSITIES

摘要

The "Life in Space" programme is a collaboration between The European Space Agency's (ESA) International Space Station Education Office and five European universities in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. Hosted annually at the Arago Laboratory in France, it consists of a two-week course during which European students learn about space-related biological disciplines through an intensive agenda of lectures and workshops. This Socrates Erasmus Programme has been sponsored by the European Commission. The existing course has now be expanded through e-leaming, firstly to facilitate access to different lectures for a larger number of students, and secondly to explore how to teach and learn within this new context. Benefits to ESA and the universities arise from active co-operation, and increased access to ESA's expertise for more students with different backgrounds, profiles, cultural behaviours, etc. The programme constitutes another step towards the integration of ICT tools (particularly e-Learning) into the educational activities promoted by ESA. Here we describe the background to this new project, the tools used, the results of this first year of activities, and the analysis of these results. Through this analysis, we intend to identify some of the key elements to take into account for the implementation of e-Learning activities in research organisations as ESA.