About us
The Avicenna Virtual campus is named after the 10th century Persian and philosopher Ibn sina. On 11–15 April 2010, Iraqi technical staff and professors from the Universities of Baghdad, Basra and Salahaddin participated in a second training workshop in online course development in Amman (Jordan). The three universities joined the Avicenna Virtual Campus for Science and Technology in November when their staff participated in a first workshop in Amman.
UNESCO has extended the Avicenna network to Iraq in collaboration with the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In Iraq, the virtual campus is building on ongoing endeavors by UNESCO and its partners to promote ties between Iraqi universities and universities abroad, in order to expand access to education and improve the quality of teacher training.
Over the past four months, Avicenna Knowledge Centers have been established at the Universities of Baghdad, Basra and Salahaddin. These centers have then been linked up with those belonging to the Avicenna Virtual Campus in Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, the Palestinian Territories, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the UK.
The three Avicenna centers in Iraq are already able to use the modules developed by the Avicenna network over the past five years. Ultimately, each Iraqi university will produce modules of its own which will then be pooled among the institutions participating in both the Avicenna Campus and the recently established African Virtual Campus.
Two technical experts from the Avicenna Knowledge Centre at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara (Turkey) will be attending the April workshop to strengthen regional ties and share best practices for course development with their Iraqi counterparts.
In November, the Iraqi team met experts from UNESCO and the Avicenna Knowledge Centers at Philadelphia University (Jordan) and the Universidad Polytechnic de Valencia (Spain).
WHY launch an Avicenna Virtual Campus in IRAQ?
- The main purpose of the establishment of an Avicenna Virtual Campus in Iraq (AVCI) is to build the UNIVERSITY of the FUTURE in IRAQ. The implementation of AVCI was first launched as a pilot initiative in October 2009.
- Three elearning AVCI Centers were officially established at Basra, Baghdad and Salahaddin Universities in 2010.
- Fifty university teaching staff were trained on the engineering of online production and elearning concepts through three training workshops organized (2009 - 2010) in partnership with the Mediterranean e-learning Avicenna Centers of Philadelphia University (Jordan), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), and technical expertise from Universidad de Valencia (Spain), Ministry of Higher Education (Algeria) and UNESCO Institute of Information Technology for Education (IITE Moscow).
Our mission is to serve AVC e-learning Centre of excellence and record e-courses material for the lectures and to train the professor of SUH via e and M learning process. The application of this new technique is for education and training knowledge and using the new technique for expanding the knowledge, and also works with partners to develop the style and putting new strategies for using the idea of e-learning in education and training programs. So towards line education and e-learning systems and to lunch performance lecturers and students towards new educational knowledge.
Expected results in 2018
- Deployment of a network of 21 fully operational “e-Learning Avicenna Centers” / one Center in each Iraqi university;
- Training of 2000 teaching staff on online course development;
- Training 3000 tutors on e-learning education methods;
- Development of 400 high quality online courses;
- Online training of students;
- Putting online an “Avicenna Virtual Library” containing online modules and teaching material;
- Implementation of an online Virtual Laboratory;
- Using the network for large scale training of students, teachers and adults;
- Establishing of National Campuses for Primary, Secondary, Technical, and Vocational Education