President Mauno Koivisto said: "Elämään kuuluu tunti työtä, tunti lepoa ja tunti torvisoittoa." Life is one hour of work, one hour of rest and one hour of trumpet playing. How do you translate this in to the world of Virtual Mobility?

Yesterday, the ICDE-Conference started in Maastricht (The Netherlands). Fully, it is called the 23rd ICDE World Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education. Many dignitaries were present. Perhaps the most prominent academic was Manuel Castells who gave a talk on 'The university: from theology to technology'.

It's definitely a great experience for many students across the world to visit foreign countries and meet different cultures, people and habits.
Very often the "real life education" is more precious than official education in universities etc. as you learn how to "survive" in this world in different -business and pleasure- "habitats".
Schools mainly teach you the facts but not how to sail between them in real life.

Let's be modest:
You decide on your future - but others define the restraints within which you are able to design your fate.

For instance, one may or may not decide to spend a semester studying abroad. In this case, the financial restraint has been decided upon by the European Union, who provides us with the Erasmus program, financing the trip. In 2004-2008, Erasmus offered more than 10.000 scholarships to students (609 million euro). For those of us without unlimited means, such a scholarship determines whether or not we will study abroad.

Last week, the partners of the MoreVM-project convened in Brno (Czech Republic).

As the project is nearing completion, one of the issues we discussed was the degree to which the project goals have been met.

Fortunately, we could conclude that a lot has been realized. Mainly, the two courses on VM (one for students, one for coordinators) have been developed and tested.
The evaluation shows that the users of our products are more satisfied with the courses than we had anticipated.

So, if I should write about my experience...I would like to thank our tutor for leading and helping us. It´s interesting to try learn online. I really enjoy the opportunity to meet a lot of people from all around the world and see their opinions and thoughts. I learn something new about my country and about foreign countries as well. But I think, that for is better going to school and study there :) This should be at least part of my studying:) But thanks to internet I could speak with a lot of interesting people, which I would never meet somewhere else.

Before I start the course I have jus little bit informations about the course and no experiences. First week I was suprised and sometimes confused because it was something new and unusual for me. The second week was more better and I really enjoy it. It was easyer and more interesting if I can discuss about something concrete and interesting like Hofstede's teorie and I was so happy if someone wrote me the opinion.

I enrolled this course because I wanted to see how virtual mobility learning can be. And it surprised me a lot. I didn´t expected so interesting activities and a way of tutoring. I read comments from everybody and I could look in lifes in different countries, see enjoyment and problems of others (for example with time management which I had as well:-)) and I could participate in discussion about cultural diversities over the countries. I learnt lot of new things and I know my way of thinking about various societies gained a new dimension.

well first off i would like to say Hofstede did a very good job in his research. its very on-point.

i learned alot from this expirience i now know how to deal with people from across a great cultural divide. this was an experience to virtually travel to more than ten countries at once and learn about them and how they do their things
i also learned that online learning needs alot of dedication and commitment in order to succed.

Two weeks of time past away very quickly. Now is the time to say goodbye to this class. I'm glad that I can be a member of this course. It really bring me a lot of new experience for virtual learning. And it provide me an excellent entironment to know many different kind of cultures and also to meet different kind of people. I got some new viewpoints from foreign friends how to think our Chinese people and Chinese culture.