Abstract:

The 6th of July 2009 58 students received the Joint Diploma on “Job Creation Oriented Biotechnology” signed by 12 Rectors. The award ceremony was held at the liaison office of Friuli Venezia Giulia Autonomous Region in Brussels at the presence of Erasmus father Domenico Lenarduzzi.
The students received also the Diploma Supplement and a small booklet with their image and the position obtained after the degree. During the ceremony after a short presentation of the course, a quality evaluation was made by Peter Brian Gahan and by the Vice-Rector of one of the University presents in the Consortium Jacek Bigda of Gdansk. This course was created as Joint Diploma by 12 Universities belonging to 9 different countries and was financed by the Italian Ministry in part.
The students are from all Universities and the common languages was English. The teachers were chosen by the consortium on the basis of their competences and offered their activity utilising the Erasmus Mobility Grant. These aspects were discussed during this meeting especially by Christian Tauch, Policy Officer in the Unit of Higher Education and by Luca Lantero of CIMEA.
The advantages of this course were the high qualification of students who are able to communicate easily with various laboratories in Europe and also outside Europe such as Canada, USA, Australia.
The presence of teachers coming from various Universities increased their level of formation and open their mind for new experiences. Their technological formation was particularly appreciated during the stage and some laboratories has offered some scholarships. Many students continue to work on the same laboratory or similar as PhD students with scholarships or other economical support. At the end of the course together with the presentation of the thesis, which must be an original work, they present also some publications in international Journals.
Nevertheless there are some difficulties due fundamentally to administrative and financial aspects, not all Universities respect the Bologna agreement, there are in each country different specific regulation of the courses, it is difficult to find economic support for the students and also for the teachers with consequent absence of permanent staff.
In order to overcome to this difficulties the network in Biotechnology (EBTNA – European Thematic Network Association), from which experience was created the Joint Diploma, have decided to develop a distance learning platform, which permit to better support the current courses and also extend these courses to other Universities not included in the Consortium.
Therefore about 40 ODL modules have been created covering practically all subject of the course. The laboratory practice was realised through virtual system giving the possibility to the students to follow and repeat experiments.
The modules were prepared using an interactive software created by an enterprise of the EBTNA network and were inserted in the platform of EBTNA web-site. At the end of each module thirty multiple choice question were included in order to permit a self-evaluation. The network has also elaborated a specific system for an objective evaluation which may be used in case of degree obtained through telematic Universities.
It is intention of EBTNA Association to develop and to implement the use of distance learning. At moment the language used for ODL is English, but the system may support also many other languages.

Keywords:

Joint degree, Biotechnology, ODL module, E-learning.