lifelong education

This vision was replaced in the late 20th century by the idea of centres of excellence, which are highly specialised but rather narrow in their approach to knowledge. The idea of civilisation degenerated into techno-bureaucracy. This trend has been further intensified by the market model of a university, favouring fields of human inquiry that make money. Also, corporate universities are being promoted, especially when new models of e-learning and mobile learning can be applied.

There is now a need for common European virtual education and a common European degree system. The content of a European virtual university gateway service would be a portal to net-based or net-supported courses and programmes, information seeking, collaboration and exchange, common denominators, ownership and endorsement labels. The quality issues include transparency, benchmarking, meta-data structure, user and peer reviews, sharing of models and best practices, a sharing system and tool description, as well as user experiences.

Virtual education in Europe has mainly taken place on a national level thus far, and there is not yet a great deal of transnational collaboration. National consortia with centres of expertise have been formed in many countries (France, the Netherlands, Finland, etc.), while some single e-universities and project-based national initiatives also exist. Public-private partnerships are also developing, and there are new providers of content from corporate and media-linked sources. The issues of quality assurance and accreditation, as well as international strategic alliances, are being widely discussed.

In Finland, the following progress has been made in recent years in introducing e-learning to higher education:

• Changes in management: earlier, the management of the university gave orders to departments and faculties to make progress in applying e-learning within their work. The solution then was further training of the faculty members. Now, there are strategic services, enabling the universities to involve the departmental level. This middle-out approach involves the operative directors of departments and faculties.
• The trend is to promote cooperation between the best research and teaching universities so that material of high quality will be available to all. A European learning portal between universities is being constructed.
• Common support structures and credit systems are being developed between selected European universities which would guarantee mobility and operative infrastructures. Students of any of the participating universities would be able to participate in research-based education. Also, search engines for the courses are being developed.

The article is originally published at “e-Learning Conference 2005: Towards a Learning Society 2005”.