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'.

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.

This week, 40 students from 4 countries finished their participation in the International Marketing Course. For me, as organizer of the event, this meant prompting all students to fill in the Evaluation Form, and anxiously looking at their opinions to see how to further improve this course.