AGBU Armenian Virtual College hosted more than 1,000 Ministry of Diaspora’s “Ari Tun” participants this year (Summer 2013)
08/21/2013
Ari Tun 2013 youth program of the Ministry of Diaspora of Armenia involved more than 1,000 young people aged 13-20 from more than 30 countries during the summer of 2013.
The program started in June and comprised 8 stages that continued throughout the summer. Each stage of “Ari Tun 2013” included about 100 to150 young participants that had a unique opportunity to visit Armenia, make Armenian friends, live with host families and strengthen their ties with their Homeland.
The AGBU Armenian Virtual College hosted each group of “Ari Tun 2013” at its premises. During the visit and presentations the young Diasporans learnt about AVC projects, classes, enrollment procedures and online students’ life in general. The meetings were organized in two parts.
In the first part of the meetings AGBU Armenian Virtual College Partnership Development Specialist Naira Gasparyan made a brief introduction of the AGBU Armenian Virtual College. The goals of the Armenian Virtual College, description of the online courses, and the enrollment details were introduced to the participants. Afterwards, AVC online instructors made a short introduction to the online courses presenting interface of the online study platform, including online multimedia classes, games and study tools, assignments and quizzes, student forums and chat interfaces.
The second part of the meetings involved entertaining and fun activities, including interesting discussions, interactive games and group competitions during which the young participants comprised three groups, selected their leaders and competed with each other answering questions about Armenian culture and history, singing Armenian songs and performing Armenian dances.
The participants, on the whole, became very interested in the AVC online learning environment. The enthusiasm and energy “Ari Tun” participants got from each meeting was quite obvious: AVC team did its best to bring-in the interest in Armenian education to young generations in order to remain loyal to its mission to expand the virtual learning community fostering cultural education and social communication with more and more Armenians from all over the world.