1.8 SE eLearning & Forum
A report from the Communications Committee
During the past several months the SE Communications Committee with help from members Anja Krüger, Mareike Zettel, Christian Vogel, Stephan Dahl have been researching and discussing the future of SE online and the implementation of a vision of an online SIETAR university as generated at the Budapest Congress.
Mareike Zettel attended the Interkulturelle Sommerakademie in Jena and networked with others interested in intercultural elearning and who want to exchanging ideas, experience and research results, would look forward to an online intercultural course offering. There will be a smaller congress at Jena in January at which Mareike and a colleague will present criteria for intercultural eLearning.
Michael Thiel and George Simons met in La Napoule in mid-September to discuss the progress and contributions of everyone and to make recommendations to the SE Board.
Here is the current situation:
  • Each regional SIETAR has its own website and service provider. A full listing of these can be found at http://www.sietar- europa.org/about_us/links.htm. Some have on line discussion capabilities. Some do not. Those that exist are not terribly well used.
  • SIETAR Europa has its website hosted by Strato in Germany. This contains the www.sietar-europa.org public site along with the SIETAR Documentation Center and the Newsletter.
  • In addition SE has a member's only (password protected) worksite at http://quickplace.mce.be/sietar-eu which is hosted by special arrangement with Management Centre Europe in Bruxelles. This platform, using IBM/Lotus QuickPlace, while having all the functions we might need has proven slow and less user-friendly that we had hoped. Migration to a new server some months ago increased the speed, but members still frequently complain of problems and often need considerable help.
  • There are numerous intercultural discussion places where many SIETAR members are already participating, though they are not explicitly SIETAR sites, e.g., www.dialogin.com, which supported us for the online portion of our Budapest Congress, and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/interculturalinsights/ a popular discussion forum originating with and managed by SIETARians Dianne Saphiere in the USA and Madhukar Shukla in India. Tuula Krabbe deserves everyones thanks for having helped manage the group until recently.
  • Most recently SIETAR UK has opened up a discussion area for all SIETARians who wish to join at http://www.sietar.org.uk/europa/. There is more information in the SIETAR UK news item in this issue of the newsletter.

Our desired objective is to provide a unified online environment where SIETAR members and groups can work virtually and become true communities of practice. We would like to have this in place by the beginning of 2004. This includes:
  • Secure member access and private workspaces for the managing groups of SIETAR Europa and the regional SIETARs, for special interest groups, and research or service projects. Simply for whatever the directors and members need to work profesionnally online.
  • A forum for ongoing intercultural discussions that can be initiated by individual members or can be used for simple asynchronous elearning offerings. The ability to use formatted text and graphics, etc.
  • A secure online directory with member profiles to assist in networking for projects, to serve clients, etc.
  • A knowledge management tool, library or cybrary for archiving and updating critical.
  • Calendar, email, chat and planning functions.



Potential Solutions include:
  • Accepting the offer of Management Center Europe to collaborate with them in developing a new simpler, faster platform (likely based on PPHP programming, for those of you who are technically savvy). The cost of this is our time and effort.
  • Working with a variety of other suppliers either being used or available to our members to develop what we need.


There are some important considerations in making our choice:
  • Cost of setup, annual fees and maintenance.
  • The level of control we can exercise over the platform if it is hosted in another institution or organization. The less we manage the platform, the greater our risk of not being able to work as flexibly effectively as possible. We are also at the mercy of a change of policy, technology, etc. from the hosting organization.
  • Range of services offered and both technical support and the kind of user friendly handholding that members unfamiliar with virtual working will need to get started and troubleshoot their participation.
  • Awareness of our own lack of expertise in the technical and managerial side of platform creation and maintenance.

Among the solutions we examined in addition to what we are already using, we found that some were excellent workspaces but simple too expensive for our current budget, e.g.
Some were affordable but only offered partial solutions:
Some involve assistence in building our own site and either using or having our own server.
  • http://www.m2studio.de in Munich. Currently builders of DIVERSOPHY online.
  • http://TWiki.org/ a highly flexible and effective freeware but without customer support. Perhaps a bit too unstructured for our beginning group. Anja did a comparative study of Wiki with Icohere, Stud.IP, BSCW, LiveLink and it compared favorably.

Next steps We need to take a decision shortly and divide responsiblities for the continuence or construction of our platform needs. We ask that those with IT and online expertise will step forward and give us a hand.
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