ETCplus: a project for the creation of an innovative university

ETCplus found its life from the best practices identified in the ETC1(Enforcing Team Cooperation) project. After being applied in about 50 different projects involving Italian universities, ETC has been extended to produce an experiment of cooperation between two diverse communities of practice cooperating around two selected academic courses: one in Italy, the other one in the United States. The ETCplus project is designed to create a collaborative learning environment by joining students and teachers of two international academic communities. The project will focus on i) sharing teaching material, ii) collaborative development of virtual projects and iii) educational formation of the participating students. In this paper we describe the project design issues and we discuss the problems related to the cooperation of two communities with two very different realities. The model of the process of collaboration is designed on top of a shared IBM Jazz platform. Several teaching methodologies and activities have been designed including forum of the most compelling topics, programming camp, and role exchanges.