The ONE Meeting Project : Virtual Toolkit

The Virtual Toolkit presents a selection of usable virtual tools for project staff within EU projects. The target group of this project being higher education professionals who work in cross-national projects in management, administration, research or technical support, defined the virtual tool selection and their division into categories. University of Jyväskylä (JYU) co-lead the development of the Virtual Toolkit working closely with Canice Consulting Limited (CCL) whose expertise was integrated using their earlier work on a Virtual Toolkit as a starting point. All partners in the ONE Meeting project had a significant role in the development of the Virtual toolkit. The creation of the Virtual Toolkit included several phases. In the first phase, the interview data that was gathered during the consultation of EU project professionals (N = 38) from 18 countries was used for the creation of a longlist of virtual tools. This list was then complemented by all partners through adding their favourite tools. In the second phase, JYU and CCL defined six categories for these tools based on needs of transnational projects in higher education: (1) Project management tools, (2) Collaboration and file sharing tools, (3) Research tools, (4) Meeting and webinar tools, (5) Polling, presentation and animation tools, and (6) Digital content creation tools. In the third phase, JYU designed a survey for partners to rate the usability, aspects of universal design and price of each tool. In the fourth phase, all partners carried out initial testing of the longlist of tools and, agreed on the final list of 23 tools based on the given criteria. In the fifth phase, partners wrote the descriptions for each selected tool based on a template created by CCL. In the sixth phase, JYU and CCL asked internal feedback from all partners and provided a revised version of the Virtual Toolkit. This procedure was repeated before the Virtual Toolkit was distributed for pilot testing. In the seventh phase Virtual Toolkit and a Feedback Survey were delivered for 48 pilot testers that presented the target groups and were located in different European countries. The final version of the Virtual Toolkit was edited based on this feedback. CCL was responsible of finalizing the graphic design of the Virtual Toolkit. Finally, the published Virtual Toolkit was localised by translating it to Spanish, Italian and German.