The project

Horizontal, national-level support

Τhe majority of the Greek Higher Education Institutes (HEI) – Universities and Technological Education Institutes – have launched projects for developing open courses, available to the general public. These projects have been funded by the Greek Ministry of Education in the context of the Operational Programm “Life Long Learning”, co-financed by Greece and the European Union.

In addition of the HEI’s Open Courses projects, the horizontal project “Central Repository of Greek Open Courses” has been launched at national level as well, in order to coordinate and support the aforementioned HEI’s projects. The horizontal project aims at supporting the Greek HEI in developing and providing open academic courses. It is carried out by the Greek Academic Network (GUnet) – a non-profit organization formed by the Greek HEI.

The main target of the horizontal project is to develop, and make available to the public, a National Open Courses Search Portal (NOCS) as a means for searching centrally the open courses provided by the Greek HEI. A big number of open courses include educational multimedia content, such as video lectures.

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Briefly, the main objectives of the horizontal project are:

  • the design, development and operation of
    • the horizontal NOCS portal
    • the Open Delos platform, a rich media and lecture platform for education
    • the upgrading of the Open eClass platform in terms of architecture, user interface and functionality in order to support open courses
  • the drafting of specifications for the open courses structure and the required equipment for the development phase
  • the provision of guidelines, training and consulting services, related to the development of open courses, to the HEI and their staff
  • the central hosting of open courses to achieve economies of scale
  • the raising of the awareness of faculty members, and the training of HEI’s support staff
  • the awarding of the best open courses
  • conducting promotional activities, publicity and dissemination of results

Other objectives of the horizontal project are:

  • the upgrade of the structure and content of existing digital courses, based on international practices and standards, for the resulting open courses to become facilitators of face to face teaching
  • the promotion OER development
  • the definition of institutional policies for the open courses and OER
  • the handling of issues related to intellectual property and the creation of educational material accessible by disabled people