Smart Regions

Wad and Water is the title of a virtual learning environment for pupils of all levels from 10 years upwards. In order to acquaint the pupils with the unique flora and fauna along the North Sea Coast, it built an adventure game around the Dutch-German Waddensee. The interactive learning methods are innovative and also provide a cross-border learning environment between the Northeast of the Netherlands and Northwest Germany, the so-called "Ems Dollart Region".

An unforeseen side-effect of the ICT4SMEs project was the development of a close relationship between Noorderpoort College Groningen in the Netherlands and Rogaland Education Center Stavanger in Norway. Both institutes are involved in Vocational Education and Training (VET) and further professional development. Together with the regional job agencies and Eures Cross-border they set up a project to tackle the lack of a skilled workforce in the Rogaland region by developing special training courses for unemployed workers in the Groningen region.

The idea for the European Media and Broadband Center has been developed within the BIRD project. The aim is to support the learning process of students in the ICT and Media sector by working closely together with companies in these sectors. Students are confronted with ‘real-life’ tasks and have to come up with results in interdisciplinary teams. The companies have the opportunity to find the talents they need.

Students are much better at dealing with ICT than most of their teachers. Designing adequate e-learning material is an art, which is not (yet) taught in teacher training programs. Therefore, a lot of "do-it yourself" is going on, which is often the positive initiative of a number of creative teachers who are interested in ICT for teaching purposes. The problem is that there are many different approaches, not all of them of good quality. Although e-learning has a clearly innovative aspect it is still not regarded as a major learning method.

Welgeleghen is an educational project, which would not be possible without broadband facilities. The target group is students in social work and social pedagogy aged 17-25 or older. It is based on the idea of interactive learning in pleasant surroundings, which is why this online tool is designed as a small town with a number of facilities. The tool serves as main site for our students: they can find general information about their subjects, find work placements, cases and tasks to solve, job offers from private or public companies, a library, the daily newspapers etc.

Artogather is an educational project set up by Noorderpoort College together with the Groningen Museum and the Biblionet, a consortium of libraries in the North Netherlands region. Artogather has been designed especially for students with a low-grade education, who have never really been in contact with the arts and therefore need a special approach to arouse their interest. Broadband facilities make it possible for these students to take their first steps into art education.

Community Network is a glass fibre network in the whole city of Groningen. It is an 'open network': the infrastructure is separate from the services. A connected organization is free to choose any service supplier on Groningen Internet Exchange (GN-IX). This improved market competition considerably. Prices have gone down and supply has grown: about 30 suppliers offer their services at GN-IX.

The ICT Innovation Center is a centre for innovative learning, based on modern ICT. As part of a Regional Education Center (ROC Noorderpoort College) it develops e-learning material on a broad scale for the College itself as well as outside. Working closely together with SMEs in the North Netherlands region, it develops tailor-made training materials according to specific needs of these companies. Virtual learning environments, web-based trainings, video clips, all these materials are designed by working groups consisting of technical programmers and pedagogues.