VRTUOSI

A Pioneer Virtual Exchange Program between Five European Universities

Andr´es Redchuk, Javier M. Moguerza and Javier Cano

Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Rey Juan Carlos University, 28943 Fuenlabrada, Madrid, Spain

Keywords:

on-Line education, e-Learning, Postgraduate, Exchange, Internationalization, Quality Improvement, Six-

Sigma.

Abstract:

Exchange programs have been very successful in Europe at the undergraduate level. However, difﬁculties arise

when attempting to implement it at the postgraduate level because of the ties (personal, professional, etc.) of

more mature students. We describe here the organization and implementation of VRTUOSI, a pioneer virtual

exchange program between ﬁve European universities. We also introduce a Six-Sigma based methodology

designed and developed to improve the quality in the VRTUOSI standards. We describe its structure and

web implementation, as well as its application to improve other european e-learning programs and our online

Master in Decision Systems Engineering (MDSE), emphasizing its positive effects on its internationalization

and popularization.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is commonly acknowledged that the ex-

change program ERASMUS (European Action

Scheme for the Mobility of University Students

http://ec.europa.eu/about/ds

en.htm) can be regarded

as one of the biggest successes of the European Union

(EU) educational policy. Since its launching in 1987,

more than 3,000,000 students and teachers have par-

ticipated in their programmes. However, the majority

of the participants has been undergraduate students,

being the presence of postgraduate students merely

testimonial (something that the Bologna Process

www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/

aims at changing). One of the main reason for this

phenomenon may be that postgraduate students

might have more restrictive family, professional

and/or work ties being more mature.

With this motivation in mind, we have proposed

the EU our VRTUOSI, http://www.vrtuosi.com,

within the Virtual Campus framework of

the EU Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP)

http://ec.europa.eu/education/index

en.htm. Ours

was one of the ﬁve proposals chosen by the EU in

the 2009 call. In this work, we provide a detailed

description of VRTUOSI, placing special emphasis

on its more paradigmatic issues. Indeed, these might

be of interest to other Higher Educational Institutions

planning to implement similar programmes.

Quality is an important issue within the Euro-

pean educational framework, as only outstanding

programs will beneﬁt from European and national

funds and will call attention of a larger number of

students, ensuring their survival in a very competitive

environment. In this regard, we provide details of

the design, development and implementation of a

Six-Sigma based methodology to assess the quality

in our Master degrees (Chua, 2004; Cullen et al.,

2003; Harry and Schroeder, 2000). This quality

management system was ﬁrst implemented in our

Master in Decision Systems Engineering (MDSE)

http://www.masteringenieriasistemasdecision.com/,

over the ﬁve-year period 2005–2010, and has been

adapted to monitor the launching of the ﬁrst edition

of VRTUOSI. In this preliminary work, we focus

on the description of the project, its concept and

the implementation framework. In future works,

empirical data will be provided.

The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section

2 we provide an overall description of VRTOUSI and

its basic structure. Section 3 presents the guidelines

of the implementation process and legal framework

of VRTUOSI. Section 4 introduces the basic theoret-

ical guidelines of the Six-Sigma based methodology

we have followed in our master degrees programmes.

Following, Section 5 shows how our Six-Sigma based

management system can be used in practice to im-

prove the quality of our teaching standards. Section

297

Redchuk A., M. Moguerza J. and Cano J..

VRTUOSI - A Pioneer Virtual Exchange Program between Five European Universities.

DOI: 10.5220/0003345002970303

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 297-303

ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

6 provides some practical advices for the implemen-

tation of similar programmes. We conclude with a

discussion.

2 GENERAL DESCRIPTION

OF VRTUOSI

VRTUOSI allows the exchange of virtual courses

between these ﬁve universities: Universidad Rey

Juan Carlos (URJC, Spain), Universit Paris-Dauphine

(France), Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal),

Obudai Egyetem (Hungary) and Tampereen Teknilli-

nen Yliopisto (Finland). The company Habber Tec

S.L. also participates in the program as a partner.

VRTUOSI focuses on the exchange of courses at

the postgraduate level (Master and PhD degrees) for

students original from these ﬁve universities in Deci-

sion Sciences. It provides open access to part of the

material, being the rest of the material restricted to the

students taking the courses, who will get credits after

completing the proposed tasks.

The courses are taught in English, including the

following courses, all of them of 3 ECTS (European

Credit Transfer and Accumulation System units):

• Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain)

– (VR MAD001) Simulation;

– (VR MAD002) Quality Control: Six-Sigma;

• Universit´e de Paris-Dauphine (France)

– (VR PAR001) Tools for public policy evalua-

tion;

– (VR PAR002) Game Theory and Practice;

• Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal)

– (VR COI001) Multiobjective Meta-Heuristics;

– (VR COI002) Multicriteria Decision Analysis;

•

Obudai Egyetem (Hungary)

– (VR BUD001) Operational Research Methods;

– (VR BUD002) Computational Intelligence;

• Tampereen Teknillinen Yliopisto (Finland)

– (VR TAM001) Many valued similarities;

– (VR TAM002) Data Mining.

Each university teaches two courses and sends six stu-

dents to each course. Therefore, each course is under-

taken by 30 students, and the whole master is attended

by 300 students in this ﬁrst edition 2010–11, which

covers 30 ECTS. Each student is allowed to register

in a maximum of 6 ECTS (the usual academic load is

60 ECTS per year for postgraduate students).

3 IMPLEMENTATION OF

VRTUOSI

The implementation of VRTUOSI has required spe-

ciﬁc actions from each participant university, as well

as a common coordinated action. In this section, we

outline the most important issues regarding the imple-

mentation of VRTOUSI.

3.1 Legal Framework

One of the most difﬁcult tasks in the implementation

of VRTUOSI was to provide it with a legal frame-

work. An initial agreement was signed by the coor-

dinating university (URJC), and the EU. An ad hoc

agreement was issued by the six members of VRTU-

OSI, based on the standard agreements of the FP7-

type projects http://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm .

Such agreement may be useful for future similar pro-

grams. See the VRTUOSI webpage for speciﬁc de-

tails.

3.2 A First Insight on the Virtual

Campus

Our initial idea was to launch a Metacampus over the

virtual campuses of the ﬁve participating universities.

However, due to the different maturity of these

virtual campuses, we eventually opted to create a

new website offering information about VRTUOSI,

containing open-access material and facilitating ac-

cess to the URJC Virtual Campus. All the VRTUOSI

courses are then hosted at the URJC Virtual Cam-

pus, http://www.campusvirtual.urjc.es, supported

by a WebCT platform, see www.blackboard.com,

http:// courses3.webct.com/webct/public/home.pl for

details.

A username and password was provided for teach-

ers and students not belonging to the URJC. The user

interface giving access to VRTUOSI is shown in Fig-

ure 1.

Once we have chosen a speciﬁc course, we can ac-

cess all the related information and materials, which

are organized as shown in Figure 2.

3.3 Virtual Campus e-Learning Tool

Through the VRTUOSI webpage, and once identiﬁed

by the system after introducing his/her unique login

and password, a student can access his/her assigned

courses.

The Virtual Campus is the main tool for e-learning

purposes. It hosts basic information, materials and

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Figure 1: Entering VRTUOSI.

Figure 2: Six-Sigma VRTUOSI course structure.

rules about the courses. But it also allows participants

to communicate within a secure environment.

The main modules from within Campus Vir-

tual are: Control Panel, Guide, Materials, Calendar,

Teachers, Students, Marks, Progress, Resources, As-

signments, Exams, Communications and e-Talk, as

shown in Figure 2. A sample course which shows

the basic structure of a hypothetic course is avail-

able through the Virtual Campus for didactic purposes

for intervening lecturers. We outline now the general

structure of the most important modules:

• At the Control Panel there is a File Manager,

which allows the user to manage his/her ﬁles dur-

ing the course. It is possible to upload, delete,

move, zip, unzip ﬁles to the system, among other

actions;

• The Guide module provides a small description

of the course, and contains the planning for the

course;

• The Materials module hosts all ﬁles needed for

the course, except assignments and exams, which

are placed in separate modules. It is possible to

display an organized hierarchy of documents;

• The Calendar module is a very useful tool in or-

der to synchronize the teachers and students. It is

possible to publish special dates on it;

• The Teachers module provides a small descrip-

tion of the proﬁles and CVs of the teachers of the

course;

• The Students module shows the proﬁles and

records of the students;

• The Marks module manages the students’ marks.

It is possible to edit each mark or assignment from

there;

• The Progress module allows students to track

their evolution during the course;

• The Resources module stores relevant informa-

tion regarding the course as e.g. links to external

contents;

• The Assignments module allows teachers to set

assignments for the course. It also manages sub-

missions of students and their eventual evaluation

by teachers;

• The Exams module is an interactive tool that al-

lows teachers to prepare and launch on-line and

off or on real-time exams and tests for the stu-

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299

dents, who may be remotely connected while ac-

complishing it;

• At the Communications module, the user can

ﬁnd different tools. The most important one is the

Email service, through which students can com-

municate the teachers and vice versa;

• The e-Talk module works as a forum, where stu-

dents can post questions to other students and/or

the teachers, or debate about them.

It is important to note that any of these components

can be hidden or revealed to the students. For ex-

ample, it could be interesting to hide part or all the

ﬁles in the Materials module until the beginning of

the course, depending on the pedagogical strategy.

3.4 Training

Given the different maturity degrees in the develop-

ment of the virtual campuses of the ﬁve universities,

we undertook three training courses for the teachers

taking part in VRTUOSI. The ﬁrst session took place

in the classroom in Madrid. Two others were on-

line sessions using Adobe Connect



for that purpose.

Sixteen teachers attended the courses.

3.5 Diffusion and Registering

The VRTUOSI program was advertized in various

ways: through VRTUOSI website, and through the

deliverance of brochures and posters in the areas

of inﬂuence of the ﬁve universities. Besides, addi-

tional diffusion was achieved by including it in differ-

ent seminars, conferences, websites, distribution lists,

etc.

The registration process is implemented through

VRTUOSI website. After validating the origin of the

applicant students, we grant them an accreditation,

username and password to gain access to the selected

courses.

3.6 Courses

Within the Virtual Campus, the ten courses follow the

same methodology, based on that of the URJC Virtual

Campus, acknowledged with the quality certiﬁcate

EFQUEL (http://www.qualityfoundation.org/). The

main part of the teaching material, except the tests and

the exams, are available in the open-access area of the

Virtual Campus. In general, the courses are taught se-

quentially, in three-weeks slots (plus the time needed

by the students to accomplish and deliver the tasks).

The time length needed to implement VRTUOSI is 36

weeks, being the overall time length of the program

two years.

4 METHODOLOGY FOR

QUALITY ASSURANCE BASED

ON SIX-SIGMA

We give now an insight of the most relevant issues we

have encountered in the implementation of our Six-

Sigma based methodology. As it is well known, Six-

Sigma improves any existing process by a constant

revising and returning of the process. To achieve this,

Six-Sigma uses a methodology known as DMAIC

(Brassard et al., 2006), which is the acronym of:

• Deﬁne opportunities;

• Measure performance;

• Analyze opportunity;

• Improve performance;

• Control performance.

Six-Sigma incorporates basic principles and tech-

niques used in Business, Statistics, and Engineer-

ing. These three elements form the core part of our

methodology. Six-Sigma improves the process per-

formance, decreases variation and maintains a consis-

tent quality of the process’ output. This leads to bet-

ter results and an improvement of students and stake-

holders’ satisfaction.

The main objective of our implemented method-

ology is to assure the quality of the exchange scheme,

and identify potential enhancements for future edi-

tions of the exchange scheme, the implemented vir-

tual Master and the developed courses.

4.1 Quality Principles Adopted in the

Project

For the deployment of the project, we have selected

and adopted the following quality principles:

• Focus on our students;

• Understand expectations of interested parties

(stakeholders);

• Involve our organization’s people (administrative

staff, teachers, etc.);

• Use a process management approach;

• Adopt a systems approach for management;

• Encourage continuous improvement;

• Grasp the facts before deciding;

• Work with our organization’s stakeholders (com-

panies, other universities, students, etc.).

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Table 1: Project road map.

Deﬁne Measure Analyse Improve Control

Develop a vision Collect baseline data

on mistakes and

possible causes

Create focused

project statement

Create possible

solutions for root

causes

Develop and

document standard

practices

Map the process Analyse for special

causes

Explore potential

causes

Select solutions Train staff teams

Understand students

needs

Create Pareto

analysis

Calculate starting

level

Create detailed

process maps

Organize potential

causes

Collect Data

Use statistical

methods to quantify

cause and effect

relationships

Develop plans

Pilot plans

Implementation

Measure results

Evaluate

Monitor

performance

Create process for

updating procedures

Summarize and

communicate results

Recommend future

plans

4.2 Six-Sigma Project Road Map

The project follows the DMAIC sequence displayed

in Table 1.

4.3 Process Selected for Measuring,

Analysing, Improvising and

Controlling

As we have mentioned before, the core process of the

project is the DMAIC cycle. After deﬁning the aim

of the project (letter “D” of the acronym) we have se-

lected the following processes for each stage of the

remaining of the cycle (MAIC):

• Normative Framework;

• Course development methodology;

• Six sigma based quality assurance methodology;

• Platform ﬁnal timing;

• Course development;

• Exchange scheme implementation;

• Scheme quality assessment evaluation;

• Dissemination.

4.4 Accomplished Tasks

During the project we have completed the following

tasks:

• Review of the European University Quality in e-

Learning (UNIQUe) self-assessment and evalua-

tion protocol http://unique.europace.org/p34.php,

under a DMAIC approach;

• Develop a guide of good manners and best prac-

tices under a DMAIC approach.

5 IMPROVING QUALITY USING

SIX-SIGMA

To ensure satisfactory quality levels in the rendered

service to the potential users of VRTUOSI, we have

developed and implemented a Six-Sigma based qual-

ity management system, which allows us to identify

the weaknesses of our program or its courses (Pizdek

and Keller, 2009; Pande et al., 2007).

5.1 Background

Various methodologies aimed at improving the qual-

ity of postgraduate degrees have been and are still be-

ing used, either in the design phase, or in its develop-

ment and implementation stages. The most remark-

able ones are: Factor analysis; Clustering analysis;

Multidimensional scale analysis; Conjoint Analysis;

Legal or referential guidelines, as e.g. those given

by the International Organization for Standardization

(ISO), www.iso.org; Excellence models, as e.g. those

recommended by the European Foundation for Qual-

ity Management (EFQM), www.efqm.org.

However, we have opted for Six-Sigma, because

it is a more ﬂexible methodology whose stages are,

in addition, based on the principles of the scientiﬁc

paradigm. The keypointwithin this approach is to use

the scientiﬁc method for the design and implementa-

tion of the VRTUOSI project. In this way, the whole

project can be afforded as a scientiﬁc problem and, as

a consequence, the scientiﬁc method can be used to

solve it. Therefore, we have used characteristic tech-

niques of the Six-Sigma methodology on the design

and development of the processes within VRTUOSI.

We outline the most relevantones in the followinglist:

• DMAIC cycle;

• Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

(Stamatis, 2003);

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• Anticipation and Fool Proof techniques,

like Poka-Yoke (Shimbun, 1988), see http://

www.poka-yoke.org.uk for further details;

• Processes Mapping, like the Suppliers, Inputs,

Process, Outputs, Customers (SIPOC) standard

(Damelio, 1996);

• Advanced Data Analysis, like multivariate statis-

tics, Multivariate Analysis of the Variance

(MANOVA), and others (Spicer, 2005).

5.2 Initial Objectives

At the early stages of the implementation of VRTU-

OSI, we had several objectives in mind, which can be

summarized in three main ideas:

• Launching an online and international master, de-

signed to fulﬁll as much as possible the prefer-

ences, needs and motivations of our potential stu-

dents;

• Developing an internal quality management sys-

tem for an online and international master, based

on the “do it well at the ﬁrst try” and “paper-free”

mottos;

• To create a Six-Sigma based work methodology

which could take advantage of its intrinsic tech-

niques to remove errors and defects, and to im-

prove quality.

These initial objectives have been monitored through-

out the implementation of VRTUOSI.

5.3 Activities

The implementation of the Six-Sigma quality man-

agement system has been accomplished in the usual

way, i.e., following the guidelines of the DMAIC cy-

cle:

• Stage 1. Development and implementation of

the internal quality management system (students

management, teachers management, courses man-

agement, etc.);

• Stage 2. We collect data from, at least, students

and teachers;

• Stage 3. We improve the quality of the project by

incorporating the actions established at previous

stages;

• Stage 4. We monitor the process, making sure

that the accomplished actions have been success-

ful and have fulﬁlled their goals. Results are elab-

orated and published using different means of dif-

fusion.

5.4 Validation

Final validation is done in a similar way to that of the

“transcript and keeping records” of the ERASMUS

program. In order to reduce the bureaucracy burden,

we will deliver a single report for each course. Af-

ter its reception, each university will make their own

ECTS validation process.

6 RECOMMENDATIONS

AND BEST PRACTICES

In this section, we provide some recommendations

and best practices for potential institutions wishing to

elaborate and develop similar programs:

• Regarding the Virtual Campus

– For each course within the program, compose

a “student’s guide” describing the course, the

slides in the PDF ﬁle, and a short oral embed-

ded presentation;

– Use exclusively the Virtual Campus communi-

cation tools in order to contact your students.

In particular, avoid using your personal email

address;

– Make the students aware that there are sched-

uled slot times for posting and answering ques-

tions, submitting assignments ﬁles, and for

solving tests and exams. All these time and

work structures must be respected and followed

by both parts, students and teachers;

– It is expected that the teachers use the Assign-

ments module tools as part of the evaluation

process. This tool facilitates continuous eval-

uation.

7 CONCLUSIONS

VRTUOSI is a pioneer online program for the inter-

national exchange of virtual courses. Our university

is favoring the internationalization of our postgradu-

ate programs, allowing our students to access high-

quality courses of other European universities, and

giving access to 24 foreign students per course. The

interaction between teachers from different universi-

ties is facilitating the launching of new similar joint

programs. In this way, apart from various research

programmes we have in mind, we are planning to

launch a joint Virtual Master based on the VRTUOSI

courses.

All the procedures that have been developed can

be used as a paradigm for other similar programmes

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302

that different consortia of universities aim at launch-

ing. Our main contributions are the establishment of

a detailed legal framework, the access and registering

system, the validation system and the quality manage-

ment and improvement system.

The open-access area is arousing some interest

among the teaching community, and we are prepar-

ing a professional training model business based on

VRTUOSI courses

Regarding the implementation of the Six-Sigma

methodology, it has been a great success both in the

MDSE and VRTUOSI, allowing us to:

• Remove redundant activities;

• Remove systematic errors;

• Perform a better analysis of the recorded data.

In summary, we have managed to remove most

sources of uncertainty and errors, as well as to reduce

the unfulﬁllment of the academic and administrative

rendered services.

Besides, we have also accomplished some addi-

tional features:

• The encouragement, intensiﬁcation and optimiza-

tion of the use of Information and Communica-

tions Technologies (ICT) and of the Virtual Cam-

pus in the lecturing and learning areas;

• Favoring autonomous learning in the students;

• The optimization of the students’ performance,

leading to reduction of the academic failure and

absenteeism.

Since 2010-11 is the ﬁrst academical course in

which VRTUOSI is being implemented, we are cur-

rently recording our ﬁrst empirical results, which will

be included in future works.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

VRTUOSI is a project of Lifelong Learning

Programme with code 502869-LLP-1-2009-ES-

ERASMUS-EVC. Research supported by grants

from Rey Juan Carlos University Innovation and

Improvement on Education Programme, and project

MTM2009-14087-C04-01 from the Spanish Ministry

of Science and Innovation.

We sincerely acknowledge the contributions of the

partners and staff of the Campus Virtual division at

URJC, and we are especially thankful to Mar´ıa Teresa

Gonz´alez de Lena, Ra´ul Moreno, and Javier Ramos

de Castro, also from URJC, and to David R´ıos Insua

from the Royal Academy of Sciences in Spain.

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