Commission adopts proposal for e-learning programme

Citation

(2003), "Commission adopts proposal for e-learning programme", Education + Training, Vol. 45 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2003.00445cab.012

Commission adopts proposal for e-learning programme

Commission adopts proposal for e-learning programme

The European Commission has adopted a proposal for a programme on using new information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the quality of, and access to, education and training. The Commission would like to allocate e36 million over three years to the programme, which comes in response to calls from the European Council to help to make the EU the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.

"Digital literacy – the ability to use the Internet, in particular, as a vocational and personal-development tool, starting from a very young age and continuing throughout one's life – is rapidly becoming as important as reading, writing and arithmetic", said Viviane Reding, European commissioner for education and culture. "People without access to this new form of literacy run a severe risk of social and vocational exclusion. It is to counter this, and to ensure that the Internet is used more in schools, training centres and universities, that the Commission proposes the e-learning programme to underpin the initiatives taken over the past few years in the member states."

The programme will support, through research and analysis, the development of digital-literacy training methods, especially for European citizens who have problems with access to traditional education and training. The research work will be backed by support for innovative projects in this area, developing, for example, educational tools and materials for young people to make it easier for them to learn ICT through interactive games or to create virtual services accessible to everybody for learning about citizenship or for dialogue between cultures.

The programme will also encourage the exchange of good practice and co-operation projects, which help to raise awareness of the potential ICT offers for acquiring knowledge and gaining access to training courses. The programme will support agreements between universities to promote the use of ICT in areas such as mobility of students and teachers, quality of teaching and mutual recognition of curricula. "Virtual" mobility will complement exchanges of students and teachers organized through the Erasmus programme. A student who is to embark on an Erasmus course might, for example, prepare and/or consolidate the experience by "virtual" activities at his or her university of origin.

The e-learning programme will help to create joint virtual-university campuses in at least three member states. The campuses will be formed by developing joint online courses, accompanied by offers of virtual mobility for students and hence a mixture of real and virtual curricula. Networking of virtual universities in Europe will be encouraged, as will the development of models for public-private partnerships in higher education.

The programme will encourage each of the 150,000 secondary schools in the EU to conclude an agreement on virtual twinning with one or more schools abroad. This would enable any young European to participate in a co-operation project with other pupils from other countries through the Internet while they are at school. While it is primarily up to the member states to bring about the conditions for twinning by providing, say, suitable training of teachers or a twinning budget for every school, the e-learning programme will create a support network for virtual twinning of schools, made up of teachers who have experience in this area and provide advice and support.

The programme will also help to set up an Internet platform for information, contact and exchange of good practice, which will support or streamline virtual-twinning operations. Finally, the programme will support public-relations exercises on twinning of schools, involving, for example, publications, competitions and prizes.