Interfakultäre Koordinationsstelle für Allgemeine Ökologie (IKAÖ) |
Forschungsfeld BNE
SUPPREM is a project of the Swiss Virtual Campus programme (N°200114).
SUPPREM aims at producing a bundle of inter-disciplinary web-based learning units, oriented toward sustainability and private or public environmental management.
Financed by FOES and the Partners, the project started in May 2001 and is funded until March 2006.
Partners
- Geneva University (leader)
- Berne University (co-leader)
- Basel University
- Lausanne University
- Swiss Italian University
- Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development, UNCTAD/DITE
Persons involved in the Berne based project
Ruth Kaufmann-Hayoz, IKAÖ
Annemarie Ruef, IKAÖ
Evi Schuepbach, GIUB
- SUPPREM aims at producing a bundle of inter-disciplinary web-based courses, oriented toward sustainability and private or public environmental management.
- The courses will address issues in environmental sciences, general ecology, sanitary aspects and socio-economics of the environment, political science and law of the environment.
- The courses will be offered in a large variety of undergraduate and graduate programmes as part of the elective choice courses. They will be ECTS compatible.
- The course contents will be constructed "dynamically" from elementary building blocks or "bricks" that will be produced by a large group of Swiss specialists from French, Italian and German speaking universities.
- The courses will be made available in these three languages and English. The courses will be integrated in the curricula of the Faculties (law, sciences, social sciences, humanities, health sciences,…) of the different partner-universities. Furthermore, an agreement with UNCTAD will permit an international dissemination of some of these learning units.
- The course will be attended either 100% through a web interaction or in a mixed environment where classroom meetings will complement the learning process. Each course will be self-contained.
- To achieve the proposed flexibility and fine grain modularity the development will use a platform implementing cutting-edge authoring tools and web-based database management and exploitation tools (Oracle+XML).
>> The state of SUPPREM in September 2005 is described here
Products of the Berne based project
(1) During the summer semester 2003 an e-learning brick on 'Analysing complex environmental problems' was held as a test run with 13 students at IKAÖ in Bern. The brick introduces a tool for structuring the interdisciplinary analysis of environmental problems, integrating natural and social science aspects. It is applied to the problem of global warming. Feedbacks by students and tutors who had taken part in the test run were mainly positive. Therefore it was decided to make only a few adaptations and reuse the brick in the following summer semesters. Since then, over 115 students from different disciplines have attended the e-learning brick on global warming. See also:
"Lernen im Internet: Klimaerwärmung", unipress, April 2004, S. 12.
Since then the brick has slightly been adapted and complemented with a new environmental problem and now deals with both the problems of climate change and desertification. It ist now used in a tutorial in the Modul 2 "Analyse von Umweltsituationen und Umweltproblemen" of the Master Minor in General Ecology.
(2) A second e-learning brick has been established on the subject of 'Tools for Building Sustainability Strategies' and is now used in the Master Minor in General Ecology.
(3) An e-learning course 'Origin of Ozone - Cross-Tropopause Exchange', developed by Evi Schuepbach and Cornelia Krehl, was offered in test phase for Geography students of the University of Berne during the summer semester 2002 and was evaluated within the frame of a diploma thesis, in collaboration with Inovex AG, Bassersdorf and Fachhochschule Solothurn.
(4) English/German Guidelines for E-Learning have been developed in collaboration with Urs Guggenbuehl and Cornelia Krehl of Inovex AG:
Schüpbach E., Guggenbühl U., Krehl C., Siegenthaler H., Kaufmann-Hayoz R., 2003: Didaktischer Leitfaden für E-Learning. Didactic guidelines for E-Learning. Bern: h.e.p. verlag.