four principles
One agreement
Our our agreement is based on the four principles of mutual trust, modest effort, different calenders and same assessment.
Quality improvement
We are in our pilot phase of the program and continuously improving our procedures and support. Therefore, we collect experiences from students, teaching staff and administrative staff. This allows us to monitor if we can adhere to our principles of mutual trust, modest effort, different calenders, and same assessment while providing hight quality online learning experiences for students.
Mutual Trust
The principle is similar to regular exchange agreements: one institution (home) gives credits for an online course offered by another institution (host). Important from the quality assurance perspective is that these online courses are also offered for credits to home students. All quality requirements defined by the accreditation standards have been satisfied by the host institution and can hence be considered as granted by the home institution. The VEP student data will be stored in the same way as host institution student data. The legal conditions applied to host institution students also apply to VEP students. And students from Home institution participate in the course evaluation similar as students from host institution who participate in the same course.
Modest Effort
The teacher(s) from the host institution accepts about 10% extra students from the Virtual Exchange Program - although teacher(s) have the possibility to increase this limit. “Accepting” a student from the home institution means offering similar activities and support as offered to the host institution students as well as grading the exams of home institution students. For our alliance to be sustainable, the amount of instruction given by an institution to the other participants should be more or less equivalent to the amount of instruction it received from these other universities. No money changes hands between universities.
Different calenders
The diversity of start/end dates of semesters across the partner institutions does not allow a synchronization of host institution’s courses and home institution’s calendar. Therefore, home institution students will start and end the courses (and other course activities) according to the host institution’s calendar, and credits will be allocated at the end of the current home institution’s semester.
Same assessment
This is the most critical point for the alliance. Students from the home institution will take and need to pass the same exam or assessment as students from the host institution, in conditions that are as similar as possible as to those on campus at the host institution.