Abstract
Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in most engineering curricula. In the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work course, MUTW, students develop their capstone project as members of an international team while working at their home institutions. Team members are geographically spread to assure heterogeneous teams and to promote international cooperation. This paradigm can be applied in any project/internship course unit. The results from the pilot editions that ran between 2009 and 2011 support our initial hypothesis that MUTW significantly promotes students' soft skills without requiring costly and time consuming changes to prior degree curricula.

Abstract
In the last decade blended learning activities become increasingly popular in the education. According to the current assumption that blended learning equates to the mixture of on-line conferencing and traditional face-to-face learning and contacting. This approach is useful as well as for teaching at institutions as well as for the mobility of students and teachers. Technological possibilities are especially important, while they enable the mobility of students and teachers, in the cases like economic reasons, time constraints, family needs or any other reasons. Without technological supported mobility, those participants would not be able to experience exchange. By mixing technologies and different learning approaches, much has changed in education. Among the new additional challenges of today's education are cross cultural challenges and preparation. Considering this awareness, project experiences and practices in various projects related to blended learning and cultural issues, we will present our suggestions and lessons learned in cross cultural preparation.

Abstract
The web is a comprehensive and dynamic repository of information regarding most of the areas of human knowledge. However, retrieving information from the web is not an easy task. Web's characteristics place many difficulties to users willing to explore it as an information source. Information retrieved from the web is usually very extensive, composed of voluminous collections of hypertext documents. Taking advantage of the intrinsic value present in this huge resource requires to organize relevant information according to specific needs. When organizing web resources to satisfy persistent information needs, some evaluation scheme is required to measure the system performance, as perceived by users. The resource quality might be continuously measured, allowing for automatic corrections if and when significant deviations are detected. This adaptive quality control framework may also detect and follow drift in user information needs. We propose to evaluate and control resources' global quality based on a three-dimensional space with dimensions representing Automation, Efficacy and Efficiency. Each dimension in this space aggregates a set of measures, relevant to the resource's global quality. The quality of the system is permanently monitored; the system periodically measures and stores the values of its quality parameters. This quality framework has been partially evaluated on two web resources.

Abstract
Modern economy is highly dependent on technology requiring engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However these competences are not addressed in the generality of engineering curricula. We believe that a set of tools and curricular activities involving students from different countries, collaborating to complete projects that generate relevant outputs to the community, might improve both students' enthusiasm and their teamwork and communication skills. That is the mission of the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work project, with which we intend to prove the benefits of such an experience on improving students' personal, academic and professional skills as required by modern society.

Abstract
Over the last decade the interest in social virtual worlds as tools to improve the teaching/learning process and to stimulate knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy, has greatly increased as a result of their promising potential. In the current work we introduce a concise definition of a social virtual world and make a comparative analysis between different virtual worlds based on Mannien's matrix. For this study, Second Life, Active Worlds and There were selected as they are the virtual environments most commonly addressed by the academic community. Finally, we discuss the potential of social virtual worlds for educational purposes. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
Nowadays, the virtual worlds provide the users a high level of immersion, being a stage for new concepts such as "virtual life". It seems that the only and real world is already not sufficient, and many people feel the necessity to belong to different worlds where they can move in space and in the time, advancing and retreating inside a virtual extended attractive space not to obey to the same rules and laws as the real world. The real and the virtual worlds get confused in a hybrid fusion of concepts. In this context the present paper aims to contribute to an increasing use of these environments, which we can stimulate the knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy. Our research provides a definition of virtual 3D Virtual worlds, distinguish the different types of social virtual worlds (Second Life, Active Worlds and There) and makes a comparative analysis between them, based on the matrix developed by Manninen in 1999, which includes a set of measures chosen according the differences and distinctions technical and user interface criteria. Finally, we discuss the potential of three dimensional social virtual worlds for educational purposes. In the future, these worlds may provide a set of services educational including e-learning materials, course module materials, assignments and class sessions, communications between tutors and learners and e-assessment. However most of today's educational institutions will be challenged to encompass the informal and holistic learning scenario