Exposed to on-going innovation, VetAgro Sup understands that students, education, learning, and information are continually transforming to accommodate the 21st century. This evolution challenged the institution to strengthen its value perception by moving towards a distributed, virtual network of knowledge sharing.
VetAgro Sup recognized, specifically, the need to maintain its leading role among veterinary schools in the animal health and food safety fields, while also keeping up with technological and knowledge-based requirements of a new generation of students, accustomed to working and learning in community-based, multimedia environments.
The objectives of VetAgro Sup were to:
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Ensure a superior learning experience for its current student body
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Enlarge its leading position to reach other French-speaking countries’ veterinary departments and institutions, with engaging and quality content, information and courses
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Increase the possibility students may have to complete formal education with informal and innovative learning tools
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Gain operational efficiency and knowledge base maximization
VetAgro Sup realized that one access point, using a federated repository system, would simplify access and improve usage of the huge amount of information that the school had gathered over time. This solution would also accommodate the new stream of digital content created directly by the users in a number of ways.
The repository would enhance the “standard” learning path, and allow for innovative knowledge distribution models, including a YouTube-like experience for engaging video resources.To respond to these challenges and achieve their objectives, VetAgro Sup selected HarvestRoad Hive as their preferred digital repository infrastructure in 2008.
Using HarvestRoad Hive as the foundation for a digital content-based environment, VetAgro Sup is now able to reuse digital content, allocate content to users, understand and manage content usage, distribution, and control to boost effectiveness of the overall experience. Furthermore, leveraging the integration capability of the repository, VetAgro Sup has been able to protect any previous IT investment and ensure a future-proof environment. VetAgro Sup chose to use Moodle as their access point, from which point content residing in the repository is seamlessly accessible.
The “YouTube for Education” service offers access to a vast amount of educational video lectures and resources in the school’s repository or a federation of third party repositories, such as YouTube™.
The fact that the content is separated from the container and that a digital federated repository is used, allows other institutions to connect to VetAgro Sup digital marketplace via their own VLE, while VetAgro Sup can maintain full control over permissions and rights.
The Veterinarian Digital Marketplace will be open for access not only by all the VetAgro university sudents, but also by students abroad, covering all French-speaking countries, including institutions in Montreal (Canada), Rabat (Morocco), and Sao Paulo (Brazil) with whom VetAgro Sup maintains regular interaction and information exchange. The immediate result is international accessibility and use of the Vet Tube.The success of implementation is based on the pedagogical analysis and process as the driving factor, in which eXact learning solutions played a major role by consulting and supporting VetAgro Sup to move towards their vision.
In 2009 Vet Tube received the IMS Learning Impact Award for Best Rich Media Solution.
