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The use of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) has become very popular in the past few years. Such courses can teach a large variety of skills, including the basics of virtual mobilities, both for students and teachers. The Open VMLH (Virtual Mobility Learning Hub) is an innovative multilingual environment which was created as part of the Erasmus+ Open Virtual Mobility project, with the purpose to promote collaborative learning, social connectivism and networking as an instructional method, OERs as the main content, and open digital credentials. In this paper, we will present the usability evaluation of the Open VMLH mobile application, a mix of heuristic and cognitive evaluation methods. Some of the issues discovered are related to the general interface and functionality of the mobile application, while others are related to the structure of the courses and the implementation of the content, but just a couple of them are critical for the user experience.

This paper describes five different pilot case studies which show how mini-MOOCs were integrated into study programs in higher education during COVID-19. The pilot case studies were conducted in five different countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, Romania and Slovenia) in the first quarter of 2020 as part of the Open Virtual Mobility project. Open Virtual Mobility project (OpenVM) is a three year (2017-2020) strategic partnership for innovation and the exchange of good practices founded by the European Erasmus+ program of the European Commission. One of the key outcomes of the Open Virtual Mobility project is the Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub (OpenVM Learning Hub), an online learning environment for the development, assessment and recognition of virtual mobility skills in higher education. The OpenVM Learning Hub hosts a set of eight mini-MOOCs, each dedicated to a specific competency cluster. Based on small-scale pilots at the universities in the five countries, this paper describes the design of OpenVM mini-MOOC, spotlights different educational approaches for integrating MOOCs into study programs during COVID-19 and highlights diverse objectives, attitudes and expectations of educators who piloted the integration of the mini-MOOCs during the pandemic. The paper explores differences in integration of traditional MOOCs and mini-MOOCs and concludes with recommendations for embedding mini-MOOCs into academic programs in view of rapid (digital) transformations in higher education such as the one caused by COVID-19.

The article presents the benefits of virtual exchanges/telecollaboration in higher education. Telecollaboration is a form of virtual mobility which can complement or substitute physical mobility. Taking part in virtual exchanges brings benefits which are in line with the recent European recommendations on education. Importantly, telecollaboration requires lower financial outlays and less time comparing to participation in physical exchanges. Thus, its implementation allows the development of various competences (linguistic, digital, intercultural, etc.) despite students’ economic and personal situation. The second part of the study presents a Polish-Italian virtual exchange conducted in the 2018/2019 academic year between the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University and the University of Turin. During the exchange learners of Polish and learners of Italian played the role of their mother tongue teachers. The research aimed to determine whether such a structure of virtual exchange is possible to be successfully implemented among students at the bachelor level. Three factors were analysed during the project: the students’ choice of online tools, forms of presenting language content to partners, and acts of code switching. The data were collected from the students’ production in telecollaborative tasks. It was found that giving students the possibility to choose the language code autonomously did not affect the exchange negatively. However, the students were not sufficiently prepared to act as teachers. Despite being familiar with various online tools, they chose those not adapted to the digital environment, and they found the language issues too complex to be successfully explained to their exchange partners.

Using Open Educational Resources (OER) provides further opportunities for collaboration both in higher education, especially during the last year, in pandemic times. Many universities have embraced video conferencing tools such as Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Skype and Google Meet for everyday learning activities with students. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalization, innovation and inclusion in higher education. This paper describes an ongoing collaboration between two universities, one in the United States and the other in Romania, where students use synchronous and asynchronous communication tools to work in a project-based learning model in information technology. Team members demonstrate, share, compare, and discuss their work, a virtual reality product, using online communication tools of their choice.

The article will examine how telepresence technologies are repurposed to enable performers to rehearse and train over distances. The discussion will revolve around a variety of telepresence technol...

With a new look on the phenomenon of mobility this chapter aims to contribute to the formulation of theories about people, society, and mobility. In this case, as traditionally used, the physical traffic and transportation system is not the starting point. It assumes that not just physical infrastructures and modalities are involved. In order to understand mobility—and that includes also transport of goods—the starting point must be the so-called communicative system. “Man is a communicative being; he is not made to be alone” (Aristoteles, 400 years before Christ). Yes indeed, people need contacts and meetings to communicate with each other. A society without communication is unthinkable. This communication now evokes physical mobility, but also, what we call digital or virtual mobility. You do not have to go on the road or even travel at the desired moment to communicate with each other. The communicative system is therefore the starting point for thinking about transportation and mobility. From this starting point, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of mobility better. From there, the question arises how to quantify and test hypothesis. Our intention is to trace endogenous relationships—so within the communicative system—between the physical and digital mobility and to find out if there exists an interchange between these two subsystems, in search of planning instruments to diminish the number of undesirable physical mobility. We conducted a small, preliminary and indicative research on this, a first struggling, and highlight a veil on this.

The article examines the models of innovative-digital development, which determine the options for the formation of Society 5.0 and the development of innovative universities that produce highly qualified personnel with digital competencies. The author’s vision of the concept of Society 5.0 in the conditions of virtual mobility is offered, which is also a “product” of learning digital entrepreneurship. In the conditions of virtual reality, digital entrepreneurship can be implemented in the following areas, namely: transformation of operational processes, which helps to gain great benefits, remote work allows you to enter all documents in electronic form, combine virtual tasks into one collective task. The five stages of development of Society 5.0 are singled out and the characteristic features of each stage are consistently revealed. It is hypothesized that the strategy of “Society 5.0” extends the concept of “Industry 4.0” to the concept of “Industry X.0”. The authors gave a general description of four key models of innovation and digital development, which determine the options for the formation of Society 5.0 and the development of business universities, namely: model “Smart Specialization”, model “Third Mission”, model “Triangle of Knowledge”, model “Triple Spiral”. In the new theory, physical and cyberspace become one in order to solve social problems and create conditions for sustainable economic growth. However, the comprehensive development of digital technologies also requires a broad infrastructure in virtual reality. Among the main areas through which the practical implementation of digital entrepreneurship, the authors identified: improving the quality of customer service (it can include understanding the customer, the use of electronic gadgets and programs, creating points of interaction with customers); transforming operational processes, which helps to get great benefits; implementation of business models (it includes the following components: electronic business support, which allows you to translate the basic functions of business into digital form. A retrospective analysis of the formation of Society 5.0 is presented.

The last decade have witnessed the unprecedented development of information and communication technologies. This has, in turn, enabled the growth and development of other sectors, such as, for example, that of distance and on-line learning. In this context of technological expansion in education it is appropriate to reflect pedagogically about technological resources and their educational purpose. That is, how to deploy the available technological resources and media in a fashion consistent with the desired educational objectives and aims. Virtual Service-Learning has emerged as a particular modality of this methodology that combines and reinforces two elements: technology applied to education and service as a pedagogic tool. This format then, reveals itself as an appropriate methodology through which to channel both technical and pedagogic innovation. In this work and, taking as reference a study focusing on two virtual Service-Learning projects, we will address the construction of a theoretical framework that will allow us to understand and improve the development of these practices through this pedagogic modality.

Students are an important stakeholder group for higher education institutions due to their increasing physical and virtual mobility. This leads to competitive pressure among universities regarding the quality of their e-learning arrangements. The offering of student-centered online group work modules is a decisive quality factor. But comprehensive descriptions for the concrete implementation of such learning arrangements and their quality assurance are rare. A shift from the academic design perspective to the student’s point of view is often missing - a fact that in the digital age can lead to migration and disinterest of students concerning the specific module or even university. Therefore, this article first introduces Virtual Collaborative Learning (VCL) as an established best practice approach, with four design dimensions for quality assurance from an academic perspective. Second, these best practices are enhanced by a qualitative analysis of 100 written reflections of VCL participants to identify, systematize and prioritize essential criteria for the success of group learning from the students’ perspective and derive additional multi-perspective design recommendations.

The recent availability of digital traces from information and communications technologies has facilitated the study of both individual- and population-level movement with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution, enabling us to better understand a plethora of socio-economic processes such as urbanization, transportation, impact on the environment and epidemic spreading to name a few. Using empirical spatio-temporal trends, several mobility models have been proposed to explain the observed regularities in human movement. With the advent of the World Wide Web, a new type of virtual mobility has emerged that has begun to supplant many traditional facets of human activity. Here, we conduct a systematic analysis of physical and virtual movement, uncovering both similarities and differences in their statistical patterns. The differences manifest themselves primarily in the temporal regime, as a signature of the spatial and economic constraints inherent in physical movement, features that are predominantly absent in the virtual space. We demonstrate that once one moves to the time-independent space of events, i.e. the sequences of visited locations, these differences vanish, and the statistical patterns of physical and virtual mobility are identical. The observed similarity in navigating these markedly different domains points towards a common mechanism governing the movement patterns, a feature we describe through a Metropolis–Hastings type optimization model, where individuals navigate locations through decision-making processes resembling a cost–benefit analysis of the utility of locations. In contrast to existing phenomenological models of mobility, we show that our model can reproduce the commonalities in the empirically observed statistics with minimal input.

The article analyzes the current state of development of information technologies, in particular, information intelligent systems that directly affect the transformation of methods and forms of education. Prospects for the development of intelligent information systems in student education are due to the interaction of several branches of knowledge — technical, pedagogical, psychological, which allows us to conclude about the interdisciplinary nature of the development of intelligent learning systems and education in general. As a result of continuous long-term improvement of the technological process of manufacturing integrated circuits and processors, a platform of the future intellectual society is formed, which will be based on NBIC-technologies (convergence of nano-, bio-, information, cognitive technologies), cloud computing and mobile applications. Improving methods of searching for educational information; high popularity of webinar-oriented platforms; use of three-dimensional graphics and principles of game mechanics for online conferences, lectures, seminars, trainings, educational games; educational opportunities of social networks involve the formation of new forms of learning. Open learning via the Internet will become a traditional form of education. Mobile devices will be considered as the main tools for organizing training. Paper editions will be replaced by electronic multimedia content. Multi-user virtual 3D worlds will replace physical visits to higher education institutions. Open educational resources will be widely used by all subjects of the educational process. Virtual mobility will break down barriers between national education systems. The authors emphasize the problem of legislative regulation of the use of «formal», «non-formal» and «informal» education and their integration in the educational process of higher education institutions.

We live in a fast-paced world where the most valuable of all commodities is time. All of us dream of having enough time to live, work, learn and enjoy life. Higher Education is transformed by these aspirations, as in today’s society students are also working adults. Therefore, online courses especially under the form of MOOCs, virtual learning environments, offers them access to virtual learning and working. The OpenVMLH (Virtual Mobility Learning Hub) is an innovative multilingual environment which was created as part of the Open Virtual Mobility, a European-funded project, with the purpose to promote collaborative learning, social connectivism and networking as an instructional method, OERs as the main content and open digital credentials. This paper presents the analysis of the OpenVMLH. By harmonizing the qualitative and quantitative evaluation performed on 139 participants, using several usability testing methods in an extended period of time (8 months), we draw our conclusions on how a MOOC platform dedicated to virtual mobility should perform. Some of the issues are related to the usability of the OpenVMLH, others pertained to the actual creation and formatting of the learning materials but very few are of high severity. The improved version of the learning hub is now used by students and professors in 5 universities.

Learner engagement and sustained motivation belong to some central challenges in designing and facilitating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). One approach to face this challenge has been the use of gamification as an attempt to enhance learner engagement and motivation through the use of game-related elements such as levels, leaderboards, points and badges. While gamification has been successfully implemented in small-scale learning designs, research on gamification in MOOCs is still in its early stages. This paper addresses this research gap and presents a meaningful gamification approach applied to the design and facilitation of a series of eight mini-MOOCs in a learning environment called Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub (OpenVM Hub). The paper examines learner experience in meaningfully gamified MOOCs in the OpenVM Learning Hub by analysing data from the evaluation survey answered by 945 learners. The results of the data analysis indicate that meaningful gamification can be considered a valuable method for designing engaging MOOCs, especially if it is combined with a modular and flexible mini-MOOC approach, which focuses on short learning events, light bits of learning content and a diversity of media formats used to support learning.

The paper describes the semantic competency directory as a technology which can be used to support constructive alignment in digital learning designs and systems. This article describes the competency directory developed in the Open Virtual Mobility project which can be used to align competencies (learning objectives) with learning activities, e-assessment and digital credentials (Open Badges). We describe technical considerations, requirements and the implementation of the competency directory with three components, i.e. Node.js-based backend with REST API, Neo4j graph database and a web-based user interface which fetches information from the REST-API backend. The paper demonstrates the value of the competency directory for support of constructive alignment in learning designs and systems especially in context of competency alignment in digital credentials.

To support the typical application scenarios defined in the fifth generation wireless network, such as the enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine type of communication, ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, virtual Mobility Management Entity (vMME) is a promising solution, which runs on universal servers and network functions virtualization instead of conventional hardware-dedicated mobility management entity. Among different vMME mapping solutions, the decomposing of MME into multiple components is a prospective approach to implementing distributed and virtualized mobility management. In this paper, the optimization of mobility management is addressed by using NFV and service function chain. A general signaling processing flow of vMME based on service function chain is analyzed. The performance of vMME is formulated considering the total signaling communication overhead cost, the total signaling communication overhead cost on backhauls as well as the migration overhead cost of state data under different function component placement of vMME. Since this optimization problem is NP-hard and the computation complexity is $O(n^{k})$ , a heuristic approach consisting of Min-TSCOC, Min-TSCOCB, and Min-MOCSD are presented, which aims to obtain the optimal solutions to the optimization problems by using genetic algorithm. The simulation results show that it is beneficial to decompose the function of mobility management, and the performance gains from vMME for different network function composition strictly depend on four mobility events.

The concept of virtual mobility is increasingly receiving attention in the literature. As one central advantage, virtual mobility enables international and intercultural experiences for non-traditional students regularly found in distance education. However, hitherto there is a lack of empirical data on the students’ experiences with virtual mobility. Moreover, adequate teaching methods and course designs have to be identified which stimulate the students’ learning motivation and learning success. This article addresses these challenges by presenting results from a joint blended learning course of two distance universities. Constructive alignment was used to implement virtual mobility and digital storytelling. The evaluation of the course demonstrates that the students generally value the opportunity for virtual mobility but likewise appreciate face-to-face contact. It also stresses the importance of suitable teaching methods and adequate course designs to spur the students’ collaboration and to achieve the intended learning outcomes.

The ability to work collaboratively in intercultural virtual teams, is constantly gaining importance for the labour market. Virtual Mobility enables students to acquire the necessary intercultural teamwork skills while remaining locally integrated into their regular studies. But still, international virtual collaborative learning scenarios demand much time and effort for planning and coordination which binds resources. The support concepts for such collaborative virtual learning groups are also resource-intensive, because learners should be accompanied by qualified e-tutors to optimise learning results both at individual and group level. Classical summative tests and exams are rather unsuitable for the assessment of collaboration as expected learning outcome. These arrangements also need new formative assessment forms, as participants need active and ongoing feedback. A meaningful assessment of learning processes and outcomes should not only be based on the observation of ‘soft’ factors but should also be complemented by ‘hard’, fixed, automatically measurable, quantitative indicators. To gain these hard indicators the research project ISLA - Indicator-based Social Learning Analytics was launched. This paper presents the procedure for implementation as well as virtual presence, content creation and relationships within the community as first derived indicators and their prototypical visualisation in a Learning Analytics Dashboard.

The global economy with technological developments, mobility incrementation and new financial and working models affects the higher education at its core. Not only the education system, policies, or delivery models are influenced, but also students' and staff mobility. A new era of online and mobile learning, of massive open online courses (MOOCs), created virtual mobilities or internships. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalization, innovation and inclusion in higher education. This paper presents the development of the Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub, a European-funded project, as an integration of several interactive technologies in an open source learning environment based on Moodle. The Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub is a collaborative online and mobile environment for promoting and assessing VM Skills of educators and students in the European Higher Education Area. The OpenVM Learning Hub includes several interactive tools in components, services and technologies. This paper analyses different open-source software and tools, essential for the OpenVM Learning hub, as its development is based on open education principles.

Navigation and orientation in known and unknown environments is challenging for blind people. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype that aims to support blind people using force feedback on a white cane. The prototype combines a common cane with a robotic ball. This makes it possible to guide the user directly without the need of additional equipment or unfamiliar navigation methods. We present a concept to mount the robotic ball at the end of the cane as well as a way to calibrate and control it automatically. In the future the prototype can be enhanced and extended so it guides blind users directly and gives feedback about directions and covered movements with the cane. This may support blind people by giving virtual mobility training or helping in navigation scenarios.

Virtual reality (VR) provides an immersive setting where it is possible to experience the perception of being present in a different place or environment. The TalkTech international project matches students at universities in the United States and Romania, to work as members of international teams as a virtual mobility. They research applications of VR, visit locations in their home countries related to their team’s assigned cultural landmark, and create VR scenes to share with international partners. Team members demonstrate, share, compare, and discuss their work using online communication tools of their choice. This project-based learning provides new advances in STEM education by using digital media, as students experience how technology enables them to communicate and work in a collaborative global environment, create and share digital content, and gain insights into the culture of their partners’ countries. Informal results suggest that the project sparks students’ interest in possible future business applications of VR.

Virtual reality applications have enabled students to experience the world through visually immersive experiences in business and educational contexts. This paper shares the results of a collaborative project in which students from universities in the United States and Romania work together to study uses for virtual reality in a business context, and then create their own VR scenes for a selected business or industry. In doing so, students follow a virtual mobility learning scenario in which they explore the capabilities of virtual reality in both business and technology educational contexts.

Today’s globalization affects the higher education at its core system, policies, and new models of education delivery but also for students’ mobility. In the era of online and mobile learning, of massive open online courses (MOOCs), adding virtual components to students and/or teacher mobility has become a requirement. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalization, innovation and inclusion in higher education. This paper presents the design and the development of the Open Virtual mobility Learning Hub (OpenVM) as a collaborative online and mobile environment for promoting VM Skills of educators and students in the European Higher Education Area. The OpenVM Learning Hub assists to enhance the Virtual Mobility readiness of higher education institutions, educators and students through achievement, assessment and recognition of VM skills. The OpenVM Learning Hub includes interactive, multiple levels MOOCs in VM Skills, the VM Skills assessment, VM Skills, Open Badges and open virtual mobilities collaboration for different stakeholders. This paper analyses different scenarios for the OpenVM Learning hub, its development based on open education principles and the inclusion of the first Open VM MOOC.

The rapidly growing number of learning materials and repositories makes the issue of how to find the most relevant and best quality resources to be integrated in teaching and learning offers. Thus, effective quality assessment tools are more and more needed. In the present paper, a case-study focusing on quality assurance in a Virtual Mobility (VM) international project is presented. VM stands for ICT supported activities, organized at higher institutional level, that makes possible or facilitate international, collaborative experiences in a context of teaching and/or learning. Different approaches were combined to ensure the quality of a specific MOOC and the OERs created to promote VM. Three main macro-indicators were identified for OERs evaluation: 1. Quality, 2. Appropriateness, and 3. Technical aspects. Each project partner was invited to search, select and peer-assess OERs related to the skills necessary to be engaged in VM. First results of the peer-review activity and future directions to ensure OpenVM OERs and MOOC quality are presented.

With the spread of the digital sphere and the proliferation of images from indirect sources that can be accessed by systems and users, verification routines have become essential to ensure media corporations' credibility. The advances in artificial intelligence which allow automated fact-checking (AFC) initiatives to be created help detect falsehoods, but they do not eliminate the need for human intervention. On the contrary, information professionals are necessary, and their functions increasingly include procedures such as mediating in videos and images. This study analyses the evolution of verification routines in audiovisual journalism and how new techniques have influenced the perception of trustworthiness and the reorganization of the television newsroom by allowing content from outside the media's own newsroom. To do so, it combines a method that examines the main literature on verification processes and compares it with the procedure used by Al Jazeera. In this regard, an exploration was conducted out based on participant observation in this international TV channel via interaction with journalists and heads of the corporation. The results indicate that advances in verification procedures make it possible to introduce visual material from the social media into the corporation's common news topics contributing to the transition from the traditional newsroom to the cloud structure and the inclusion of new audiences. These changes affect journalistic routines in a profession which has no longer been in-person for some time, in which correspondents coexist with journalists working in virtual mobility, seeking and receiving images in and from the social media.

Audioconferencing systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, seeking to improve immersion, intelligibility, and sense of presence. In parallel, mobile devices are gaining traction for such applications, often supplanting desktops as the platform of choice especially when the communication does not require video. This article describes our design of a mobile multiparty audioconference application and our research into the influence of spatial audio and interactivity on user experience with the application. In particular, we consider implementation tradeoffs and investigate whether the full potential of spatial audio is realized simply by distributing the virtual locations of the participants according to some predetermined configuration. In addition, we analyze the utility of "whisper" mode functionality in which a subset of participants can engage in an ad-hoc sidebar conversation privately from the remaining participants. Our results provide interesting guidelines of relevance to the development future audioconferencing systems., The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness supported this work under the project TEC2012-37945-C01. The experiments were carried out with the support of the Transatlantic Partnership for Excellence in Engineering (TEE). This support is gratefully acknowledged.

The networking architecture of 5G and various service requirements brings a huge challenge to the existing centralized mobility management due to the deployment of core functional modules in the core network. vMME is proposed as an alternative solution to meet different application demands. Among vMME mapping solutions, 1:N mapping is a prospective way for distributed mobility management. In this paper, the optimization of virtualized mobility management is investigated by using network function virtualization and service function chain for 1:3 mapping of vMME. A general signaling processing flow of vMME based on service function chain is analyzed. The optimization of vMME is formulated as an optimization problem to place chained VNFs of vMME and optimize the performance of vMME, by choosing the total signaling communication overhead cost and migration cost of state data as optimization objectives. Two heuristic algorithms including TSCMA and DMCMA are proposed and evaluated by simulation, and the performance of different VNF composition solutions under various application scenario parameters are presented.

Virtual reality engages participants through immersive experiences of imaginary or real three-dimensional physical environments. The combination of globalization and technology is transforming the international economy, altering the demand for skills and knowledge required from today's university graduates. To improve students' skills we have developed in the last ten years the TalkTech project, as an open virtual mobility, a project based learning with the aim of creating a multimedia artefact. The 2017 study examines how students, working to create virtual reality artefacts, also develop digital skills and critical thinking. The paper also examines how participating in open virtual mobility project enables an online multicultural educational environment that changes the students' abilities to learn and acquire knowledge. In this collaborative study, students create virtual reality artefacts using CoSpaces, a web-based virtual reality development platform, share them with their international but also local partners, and discuss similarities and differences in their work. The findings indicate that by real-time mixing of different tools and online and mobile technologies and apps students' digital skills are improved.

The notion of virtual mobility has gained prominence not only in the field of distance education. Virtual mobility is entrenched in the idea to enable students to exchange and collaborate with teachers and fellow students from other countries by the means of the latest information and communication technologies (ICT). In this paper, we argue that especially non-traditional students regularly found in distance education can benefit from virtual mobility as they are normally omitted from regular exchange programs. However, hitherto there is little empirical data about how to best implement virtual mobility in courses in distance education. We therefore present our own experiences with developing a university course which implemented virtual mobility. The course brings together students from two Master programmes in Finland and Germany. We used the ADDIE model which allowed us to tailormade the course striving to enhance the learning experience of the students. Seamless learning, problem-based learning and peer-assessment were implemented as activities to spur the students’ interaction and thereby enriching their experience with virtual mobility. The results of our evaluation are twofold. First, students indicate a high level of satisfaction with the instructional course design, the different activities and the collaboration with fellow students from abroad. Second, the results suggest that students need additional assistance as well as skill improvement and training to be able to perform eLearning. In a nutshell, the ADDIE model proved to be valuable for instructional course design by allowing testing and evaluating the merits and risks of a course with virtual mobility.

Business professionals are increasingly operating across cultures and time zones as industry globalizes. At the same time, technology is presenting more effective ways to communicate and connect over vast distances. Universities need to create innovative approaches for developing students’ skills to operate in this global multicultural environment. This chapter presents a case study of how a university moved from a traditional learning abroad approach to a blended virtual mobility model in an attempt to provide contemporary skills and more inclusive global learning opportunities. The case study also reveals how communication technology enabled students to develop skills to operate globally. The chapter concludes with a model designed from innovative experimentation that provides more accessibility and scalability in global learning opportunities for students.

Sighted people predominantly use vision to navigate spaces, and sight loss has negative consequences for independent navigation and mobility. The recent proliferation of devices that can extract 3D spatial information from visual scenes opens up the possibility of using such mobility-relevant information to assist blind and visually impaired people by presenting this information through modalities other than vision. In this work, we present two new methods for encoding visual scenes using spatial audio: simulated echolocation and distance-dependent hum volume modulation. We implemented both methods in a virtual reality (VR) environment and tested them using a 3D motion-tracking device. This allowed participants to physically walk through virtual mobility scenarios, generating data on real locomotion behaviour. Blindfolded sighted participants completed two tasks: maze navigation and obstacle avoidance. Results were measured against a visual baseline in which participants performed the same two tasks without blindfolds. Task completion time, speed and number of collisions were used as indicators of successful navigation, with additional metrics exploring detailed dynamics of performance. In both tasks, participants were able to navigate using only audio information after minimal instruction. While participants were 65% slower using audio compared to the visual baseline, they reduced their audio navigation time by an average 21% over just 6 trials. Hum volume modulation proved over 20% faster than simulated echolocation in both mobility scenarios, and participants also showed the greatest improvement with this sonification method. Nevertheless, we do speculate that simulated echolocation remains worth exploring as it provides more spatial detail and could therefore be more useful in more complex environments. The fact that participants were intuitively able to successfully navigate space with two new visual-to-audio mappings for conveying spatial information motivates the further exploration of these and other mappings with the goal of assisting blind and visually impaired individuals with independent mobility.

Paper reviews differences between virtual mobility and distance learning, providing insight into current state of art for online learning in higher education. Authors analyze main barriers and obstacles for live virtual mobility to become a mainstream practice as well as justify the possible regions of operation. Summary is provided for the most visible pilot projects that have paved the way for the term virtual mobility to become an object of interest. Main impact factors are listed and the discussion part summarizes the future vision of live virtual student mobility in higher education.

The population of mobile users seeking connectivity to the Internet has been growing over the years, spurred by the capabilities of handsets and the increasing rich Internet content and services. Mobility management to enable efficient Internet access for users on the move is thus gaining significance. IETF has standardized several protocols such as Mobile IPv6, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6, and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to provide mobility management on the IP network. With future Internet design initiatives gaining momentum, it is important that these initiatives consider mobility management as an integral part of the design. In this article, we introduce the concept of Virtual Mobility Domain and describe the main features and key strengths of Virtual Mobility Domain that are designed to provide mobility management in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture. Instead of IP addressing, the proposed Virtual Mobility Domain uses a tiered-addressing scheme to identify a mobile node with a single address regardless of its location. The tiered addressing provides a dynamic address length which brings less signaling overhead and scalable management. We also propose a collaborative network-based mobility management mechanism to provide low-latency handoffs and less processing-overhead on the mobile node compared to the IPv6-based protocols. The proposed mobility scheme unifies inter and intra-domain mobility management by introducing common anchor cloud concept which provides a distributed management and seamless mobility experience. We present comparative qualitative and quantitative performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain and aforementioned IPv6-based mobility protocols for Intra-AS roaming support. We examine handoff latency and signaling overhead performance of each protocol based on numerical results retrieved from analytical models and OPNET modeler based simulations. The results from a comparative performance study show the potential for more efficient mobility management under the proposed Internet architecture.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of virtual mobility, various types of virtual activities and the results of own research conducted within the MoreVM project. The new types of mobility, resp. virtual mobility are explored in EU context interpreting the research results and stressing case studies as examples of good practice. Virtual mobility among two or more educational institutions offers students a virtual trip abroad. There is an opportunity to acquire a number of ECTS-points at one of the foreign partner institutions or through a joint activity which are counted to the student's degree at his/her home university. This paper is based on the research conducted among ERASMUS coordinators within the EU. The research was part of the MoreVM project which aims at facilitating the virtual mobility, encouraging participation and enhancing efficiency of virtual mobility in higher education. The central focus was on the position of the virtual mobility coordinator, if such exists. There will be an overview of the main research findings reflecting the present situation in managing the virtual mobility. Sharing good experience, including the MoreVM project results, could increase the development of the virtual mobility and get similar attention and success as Erasmus physical mobility. Virtual mobility could be a valuable example also for countries outside of EU.

We study the impact of mobility on the level of cooperation between mobile nodes in a mobile ad hoc network. In a mobile ad hoc network, if the nodes are static or have a reduced mobility and if some nodes adopt a selfish behaviour, the performance of the network is affected. This is because the same nodes that are relaying the packets. On the other hand, nodes with a significant mobility affect the network topology, hence the traffic often changes routes and the probability that nodes that are not selfish relay packets is better. We exploit the advantage that the mobility provides on cooperation to propose a solution with mechanisms that generate virtual mobility in a static network or with a reduced mobility, so it seems like a dynamic network.

The concept of virtual mobility has increased exponentially through the support of modern ICT systems, especially in the area of higher education using mobile multimedia systems for new ways of collaborative learning. Connected smart handheld devices enable virtual mobility exchanges among learners independently of their physical location to facilitate teaching process anywhere and at anytime. Furthermore, these new mobile multimedia technologies supported education provide opportunities for interaction that allow extension to smart spaces beyond classical classroom. This paper, part of our research project presents a generic architecture of mobile collaborative learning platform in virtual mobility context. It describes a model of an innovative workspace allowing interactions among physical and virtual students based on active pedagogy. The functionality of this hybrid model will be exposed to achieve the usefulness and the efficiency of the system focusing on interactive multimedia system.

In last few decades E-learning has been established as a recognized form of education. E-learning offers good opportunities for virtual mobility of students-taking courses from other universities. This calls for a need to harmonize strategic planning of e-learning innovation on institutional and inter-institutional (regional, national) levels. The paper will try to point the interplay between those levels. The relation between strategic planning and innovation management, interplay between national and institutional levels of strategic planning is also discussed.

We present the UNED Virtual Mobility Campus Net Program, implemented since 2012 in collaboration with European and Latin American universities. Program’s objectives, participating institutions, procedures, and evaluation are exposed. Virtual mobility is understood as a meaningful strategy for intercultural learning by studying an undergraduate or postgraduate degree program at the local, national or international level, in relation to the student’s own studies, utilizing virtual or distance methodology; virtual mobility is also the possibility of studying specific topics or a determinate number of credits or courses. The equality of opportunity is a priority objective for UNED. The diversity of students’ personal situations necessitates formulas that, along with traditional in-person mobility (e.g., Erasmus Program), utilize virtual resources to guarantee for all the students the intercultural experience of living in an academic environment different than one’s own. We hope that the UNED Campus Net Program is of interest to readers and that we can incorporate new partners into the project over the next few years.The article deals with three main dimensions of the UNED Campus Net: objectives, implementation process and participants´ evaluation. We aspire to discuss and improve this experience in cooperation with other institutions interested in implementing virtual mobility in higher education.

The Towel project seeks to find solutions to problems encountered by both visually impaired and sighted users when travelling in the World Wide Web by leveraging solutions found in real-world mobility and applying them to the virtual world. Visually impaired users find mobility on the Web particularly difficult because of the reliance of hypermedia on visual layout and large viewable areas that facilitate and enhance sighted mobility. Hypertext design and usability has traditionally concentrated upon navigation to facilitate this mobility; consequently other aspects of travel are neglected and web mobility has suffered. Similarly, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines do not take a holistic view of travel and therefore in both these cases a fully rounded view of mobility cannot be formulated. This paper presents the basis for these assertions by drawing analogies between real-world and virtual-world mobility, and then attempts to substantiate these analogies by conducting a pilot study of virtual mobility on a focus group of both sighted and visually impaired web users. Knowledge of the differences in travel between visually impaired and sighted people will enable the design of better user agents and web content for visually impaired users as well as the sighted community.

Within the 'Virtual Mobility and Distributed Laboratories' project three naturalistic case studies of distributed research communities were conducted with a focus on the communication media used. The findings provide insight into relationships between the different media that the communities selected, and the different activities to which these media contributed. It is suggested that these findings are also relevant for distributed groups in which collaborative learning is the primary aim. A framework is presented for understanding and recommending selections of media for particular kinds of tasks, which is derived by integrating Media‐richness Theory and Activity Theory. This framework indicates how task/media fit may be achieved while taking into account the evolving character of activities in a distributed community. Some implications of the framework for collaborative distance learning are highlighted.

This article addresses the challenge of sustainable mobility, bringing a critical eye on current goalsand the alternatives that are on the agenda for the problems of urban mobility. The aim of thispaper is to present practices of virtual mobility as the support to sustentable mobility, contributingto the debate about the potential use of ICTs as an alternative for sustainable mobility. Themethodology adopted was a literature review and secondary data analysis, exploring practices thatreplace the physical displacement by virtual mobility, especially remote work, distance learning, ecommerceand telemedicine. The results show the advantages of using virtual mobility,recommending its adoption as an alternative to urban mobility problems, with a view to reducingthe need for physical displacement through its replacement by remote activity.

With recent performance increase in the area of wireless mobile communications, mobile ad-hoc networks are playing a wide spread usage in the areas of military and other applications. Cooperation among the nodes in ad-hoc networks is an important issue for communication to be possible. But some nodes do not cooperate in communication and saves their energy. These nodes are called as selfish nodes. In the literature there are many methods which deal with the selfish behaviour of the nodes. This paper proposes an approach based on incentive mechanism in a different manner. Here nodes are "made" selfish for some time to encourage nodes to cooperate in the communication. This reduces selfish behaviour. Thus this approach is called as cut diamond with diamond.

The mobile user population connected to the Internet continues to grow in number and hence provisioning seamless Internet service to such user is a topic of major interest. With new mobility architectures being investigated, it is important to have consistent comparative platforms and metrics. In this article, we introduce a novel and user-centric handoff cost framework to analyze handoff performance of different mobility schemes. The proposed framework helps examine the impacts of registration costs, signaling overhead, and data loss for Internet connected mobile users employing a unified cost metric. We first applied the framework to our future Internet mobility architecture, called Virtual Mobility Domains (VMDs). This architecture is user centric as it allows mobile users to avail services from overlapping mobility domains based on their mobility profiles. Next, the framework is applied to IPv6-based mobility protocols such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to show the framework's flexibility and adaptability. Using the framework, we compare the handoff performance of IPv6-based mobility protocols to the VMD based mobility scheme. The results indicate that the handoff performance achieved with VMD is three and nine times superior to Proxy Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 respectively.