Making Lisbon a reality

By adding an e to learning, a range of new factors has been added to the equation when looking to maximise the effectiveness of education. However, it has also confirmed or even increased the importance of content as a founding pillar of education: the more that technology spreads itself into classrooms and our lives, the greater the need for high quality, media rich content that can be effectively repurposed and reversioned for different devices, platforms and infrastructures.

The European eLearning Industry Group (eLIG), a consortium of 40 leading ICT companies and organisations, including European publishers of quality educational resources, in partnership with members from the education sector, welcomes the mid-term review of the Lisbon Strategy and fully supports the European Commission’s priority to make the Lisbon goal a reality and for the EU to become the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010.

A Vision for the future

We believe eLearning can be a key component of all EU actions to achieve the Lisbon goals, sustain growth, create more and better Jobs.

eLearning is not an objective in itself, but rather a way to make education and learning more effective, efficient and pervasive. It has the power to transform education but it should also be the engine in all major initiatives where new skills and behaviours are required. It stretches far beyond course based learning and leverages new technologies such as collaborative and community software, Instant Messaging and Blogs and social Network Analysis, to give a few examples. It encompasses concepts like Content Management, Knowledge Management, Performance Support, Workflow Learning and Virtual Cooperation. Thus eLearning can be a powerful engine for the knowledge-based society affecting us in many aspects of our lives.

In a fast-changing environment, traditional ways of education and training provision are no longer adequate to equip citizens with the skills and competencies they need to stay competitive in the labour market. Lifelong learning becomes the imperative and requires new approaches for learning. eLearning emerges as one of the key drivers for the upcoming ‘Learning Society’. The parallel development and continuous enhancement of robust ICT infrastructures and high performance networks on the other will be key to the success of the knowledge society and, hence also for European competitiveness.

Technology is an enabler to transform the way we work, entertain ourselves and learn. Access to learning will be pervasive, learning will become personalised and rich media content will make it an engaging experience. It will be just in time when we need it and available in any place where we need it thanks to the new mobile technology-based work and learning environments. It impacts all groups in the economy and society - large corporations and SMEs, students, teachers and parents.

The European content industries are facing the challenge of convergence of media related technologies in a situation of fragmentation and localization. On the other hand, the cultural diversity and multilingual nature are the core strengths of Europe. The transformation of the content industries has only just begun – the challenges are huge and range from the protection of investments, to establishing standards for truly interoperable content. eLIG considers this key to the advance of the Lisbon process.

Increasing competitiveness in knowledge-based economies
eLearning is creating new business development opportunities and improving competitiveness. The use of eLearning as a sales and marketing tool has been successfully piloted by several large, small and medium- sized businesses and can have a direct effect on the bottom line. Further awareness and investment in the development of this application domain for eLearning will positively affect the adoption rate, especially by SMEs. Moreover, eLearning can lead to cost savings through better utilisation of users’ time, efficiencies in personnel resources in institutions providing the eLearning services, as well as reductions in physical requirements (such as the need for fewer classrooms).

Creating more and better jobs
Everyone recognizes the importance of dealing with the transformation of work and continuing adult education. The vast majority of knowledge acquisition for adults happens outside formal settings and planned courses. In fact, research indicates that this is true for 80 percent of what people actually learn. New communication and collaboration technologies can enhance the learning process ‘on the job’ or as part of our lives. It is essential that businesses have a full understanding of the need to train their employees and the implications of failing to do so. Employee development is essential for day-to-day business and learning must be the focus not only for large corporations but also, and in particular, for European SMEs. eLearning is an efficient and cost-effective tool for fostering that workforce development.

Skills strategies of member state governments and associated development action plans are vital to ensure the mobility of workers and to close the ICT user skills gap. Such strategies, including eLearning, will enable governments to keep the labour force up to date with economic requirements through training tailored to each employee’s requirements. New learning methods, and especially lifelong learning, can help to integrate the workforce in a rapidly changing working environment and also to enhance their prospects for employment. This also applies to the unemployed and the digitally excluded, who need access to eContent for better job prospects.

A more effective learning process and education system
eLearning provides a basis for personalised professional development necessary for innovation, economic development and wealth creation in society. The application of new learning methods can result in a better understanding and retention of content by students and enables educational institutions at all levels to be more effective (both on a pedagogical and cost basis) in coping with the ever-increasing numbers of students, within the continuing constraints of an existing infrastructure.

Technology-enhanced learning can improve the quality of education systems as measured in PISA comparative studies. Leading countries are strongly reliant on the proactive involvement of teachers and the use of ICT to improve performances in reading literacy, mathematics and science. These changes have generated new types of learners, new processes of learning and new approaches to the evaluation of learning, which in turn have contributed to a change in teaching methods and in the role of teachers. Teachers and tutors are no longer just dispensers of knowledge, but rather proactive facilitators who promote collaborative knowledge-building and guide students to learn in a variety of environments, to navigate within and process a multitude of information resources, and to use these resources in solving problems and making decisions on their own.

Social cohesion in the learning society
Social integration increasingly depends on the participation of all citizens in education and training. At the same time, it is accepted as a means to overcome social inequality and to prevent social exclusion. Evidence demonstrates that the use of ICTs in continuing education can overcome barriers and enhance the participation of marginalised groups. Online learning communities and the use of eLearning tools have been proven to enhance social cohesion and social capital links between European citizens by forming virtual, learner-centric learning communities. The creative content sector has become a major source of next-generation jobs across the world. This sector provides true added value to the information society, and Europe must foster innovation, growth and prosperity for this industry as part of the Lisbon process.

Issues that need to be solved to stimulate the European content industry include:

Better balancing of public investment
A major reason for the slow take-up of eLearning in Europe is that public investments have in general neglected the necessity to focus on the kinds of knowledge needed for the EU Content Industry to compete at the world level. The result has been a lack of public investment in stimulating high quality content for eLearning, usable in a wide range of member states. Instead, the limited available public funds have been primarily directed at connectivity and hardware tools to access the internet.

Supporting Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity
A particular challenge is the provision of quality pedagogical cross-media, cross-platform content in digital multilingual format covering all member states. It is highly desirable, for social and cultural reasons, to cover all member states, but doing this is very expensive, given the many languages and cultures in the EU.

Managing intellectual property rights and licensing conditions
EU programmes dedicated to the development of public interest content through PPPs such as the eLearning Programme, eContent and now eContent+ are, to some extent, adapted to the needs of the publishing industry, but a major issue here is still to be resolved: sustainable business models for educational content creators should be developed where licensing and rights management issues are solved. This would permit the continued viability and coexistence of for-profit and at-cost models of content creation. It would also help to determine whether there are models of open content that are compatible with for-profit and at-cost models of content creation.

Maintaining fair competition conditions while exploring new business models based on PPPs
Public sector publishers producing or distributing content may also raise fair competition issues. In particular, public sector broadcasters in Europe often hold a unique position in the eLearning market, having been granted permission (and in some cases, strongly encouraged) to produce quality editorial materials distributed on a commercial basis.

eContent for all: take-up by SMEs and inclusion issues
Together with lifelong learning and continuing education, the use of ICT to foster productivity requires massive adoption by SMEs and, more generally, the take-up of eLearning among citizen communities who need more ICT training or incentives than early adopters and ICT-skilled people.

EU level harmonisation: towards a common core of content-rich applications and tools
Such a concept may seem contradictory to the multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-curricula nature of the EU and the fact that education policy largely remains a matter for each member state. However, a knowledge-based economy also requires skills and competencies that are not currently central to most national, subject-based curricula. The Eurydice Report on Key Competencies in compulsory education stresses the need for a transformation of the basic education system so that it can play a part in developing the skills, competencies, attitudes and values required by young people for personal and professional achievement in the knowledge society.

The importance of interoperability and open standards for content exchange, re-usability and re-localisation: more R&D is needed on these topics
Today, emerging open standards enable eLearning content to interoperate seamlessly whilst granting higher degrees of investment protection and return by enabling easier integration of content into eLearning solutions. Too often eLearning solutions ‘lock-in’ users to single vendor solutions whilst Europe, through a strong commitment to interoperability and open standards, could seize the opportunity to lead in helping eLearning to reach the tipping point where new technologies change existing usage patterns, application and business models.

The issue of granularity: impact on personalisation features
One of the benefits of technology-based learning is the capacity to enable teachers to customise content to suit their own needs, to ‘find, access, create, use and adapt the resources they require’ and to use e-learning to enable ‘greater flexibility of use and re-use across all sectors’. However, there has been much confusion between this demand for flexibility and a misconception of granularity. Too often, granularity has been put forward as a requirement for poorly structured and low added-value learning objects in the form of basic interactive animations.

How to measure and improve quality of learning materials
This last issue is closely linked to previous ones. To a certain extent, and unfortunately for users, the quality of eLearning material has not always met users’ expectations. Some member states have put in place quality assurance systems for digital pedagogical resources, either on a mandatory or optional basis. Independent systems also exist.

The need for advanced broadband for the development of rich content
True broadband is needed for the development of rich and interactive education content, but the broadband picture in Europe remains fragmented. It is a common belief that we are now witnessing the next giant leap forward in educational technologies thanks to the advent of mobile, wireless and broadband technologies, which together with grid and ambient technologies are likely to dramatically change the way and place we perceive education and experience learning in tomorrow’s educational system.

These technologies have just appeared but are progressing at a very relevant sustained rate of pervasion in our everyday society habits, providing glances of how they might affect future scenarios including a wide range of educational impacts: location based and mobile learning, interactive educational TV programmes, wireless campus infrastructures, federated content brokerage systems, may stimulate rethinking of what an ambient learning experience might be in the knowledge society and how it could relate to traditional school based activities.

To compete in the knowledge society the European educational system must rapidly make a leap forward towards emerging technologies such as mobile, wireless, broadband, grid computing and ambient technologies favoring blended pilots, focused on new technologies yet optimising new pedagogical and content publishing models.