eLearning Lisboa 2007
Conference Conclusions

LINKING E-LEARNING, QUALITY AND INNOVATION
New Strategic Directions for European e-Learning Beyond 2010

Conclusions and Key Directions for Innovation through
e-Learning in Europe

The conference resulted in four key policy messages as outcome of the two days discussions which were formulated in the final plenary. They represent the fields in which work has now to be undertaken and innovative pathways have to be found.

Forward Looking – Less adaptation, better anticipation!
How can Europe be better aware of what the future needs? Policy usually reacts to observed challenges, trying to establish conditions for innovation. However, skill development needs time and educational organisations, legislations and processes are slow to adopt new directions. In Europe more effective mechanisms are needed to enable the anticipation of future learning and qualification needs, and requirements of individuals, organisations and regions. More future observing capacities are needed which involve direct links to all stakeholder groups, build market observation capacities, and act rather than react, foresee rather than perceive and anticipate and not adapt.

Organisational Change - Less teaching, better learning!
How can the old fashioned (educational) organisations turn into revolutionary innovators? E-learning is coming to maturity. The question in most European educational organisations is not whether e-learning should be employed but rather how to realise the full potential of it. A lot of achievements have been made and many educators, teachers or trainers are helping to innovate teaching, learning and competence development, not only by using innovative technologies but also by taking them as a chance to renew pedagogical concepts and organisational strategies. E-learning has a huge potential to be an agent of change. Traditional values and processes are challenged when new technologies are introduced. Teaching for autonomy has to be learnt and self directed learning has to be practiced. Organisations have to become centres for innovation in their communities, helping learners to develop autonomy and become competent and self directed promoters of a new European knowledge economy. Less teaching for a better learning! should be the theme of organisations turning in into revolutionary innovation agents.

Seeking skills – Less passive more active!
How can we equip people to be better managers of their own human capital assets? The final push and motivation has to come from learners’ themselves. They have to become managers of their own educational processes and their own competence biographies. Learning has to have a value for them and has to be recognised in their various contexts, their communities, their organisations. However, the development of a culture in which participation is valued, change is encouraged and seeking innovative solutions for future problems is a common mission which takes efforts from all stakeholders. Apart from the direct learning environments – in schools, universities, vocational education and training centres and alike – learners have to be addressed as citizens to further shape their surrounding environment. They have to be encouraged to participate and to make a difference. Then they will become individuals, seeking skill development more active.

Social inclusion - Less barriers more inclusion
How can we promote access for all, improve usage skills, promote quality of usage? A society which is promoting innovation and development through learning has to take everybody on board. We can not afford to lose the creative minds of those not having access to education, to technology, to e-learning and knowledge infrastructures. E-Learning for all requires tearing down the barriers which exist for those unable or unwilling to access to new knowledge infrastructures. An open approach of inclusion involves to openly invite all stakeholder groups into a dialogue how barriers of motivation, technology, of pedagogy and access can be overcome.



Delivering on the Lisbon Agenda
Report from Luis Vidigal

Needs and concerns:
E-Learning was in the political agenda in 2000 but lost visibility along the years, so we have to re-invent a new Lisbon Strategy beyond proposals of 2000 and the revision in 2005;
We all recognize that Europe will not succeed in 2010 to become the most advanced and competitive economy of the world, but we have to work in that way, changing the European culture, introducing a risk and competitive awareness;
Coordination is missing on the Lisbon Strategy concerning e-Learning;
e-Learning is still too much on academic areas and on the formal education system;
We have to start to add value to the member countries and regions in Europe;
We are still dealing with the past and far away from the new challenges (self regulation, help people to think, learning to drive, etc.);
We need more linkage between Productivity and ICT possibilities;
Innovation attitudes are missing in Europe;
We need new e-learning research and concepts based on social web, orchestrating new challenges related with web teams;
Europe is still far away from the opportunities of the connected knowledge economy and the challenges of the Lisbon Agenda;
We need to improve the awareness of Europeans for the Lisbon Agenda and the social innovation proposed for individuals, enterprises and governments;
Internet introduces a new paradigm for distributed network and not only centralized or decentralized, with a direct impact on citizens. We must be proud to be Europeans;
Collaboration platforms are still missing in Europe and there is a huge gap between the fragmented market players and the social needs;
We need to improve motivation for learning not only in schools but also in enterprises and governmental agencies. – A new culture of learning is missing;
We have to live in new communities of learning.

Proposals:
Creation of new international networking consortiums;
Break actual learning system;
Creation of open standards;
Creation of an action plan for innovation;
Promotion of new learning contents and environments for the jobs of tomorrow, with hope and new career opportunities;
Go beyond individual and group empowerment succeeding on networks empowerment, increasing European performance and succeeding on the new Lisbon Agenda. – Power to the networks and interaction on contents;
Individuals must learn face to face in a new social web (Innoagent programme with European spin-ins);
Create new tools for people and small groups integration, linking innovation to people;
We have to move from Europe ownership of 2000 and nations ownership of 2005 to social ownership of the new Lisbon Agenda for tomorrow;
Is important to create a large European market for e-learning, with specific budgets on schools, governmental agencies and enterprises;
Creation of credits related to learning;
Creation of open platforms for e-learning, involving universities;
New broadband networks infrastructures are needed for alive collaboration and video content;
Old people is a problem but also an opportunity for e-learning in Europe;
Each one must create their own energy for a “long life learning” in a changing environment;
Each member state in Europe must create a new merit culture, with objectives, evaluation and written reports;
Improve competitiveness and aggressiveness;
Improve global and distributed learning;
Enterprises must replace paper manuals of their products for electronic tutorials and e-learning tools, improving ICT competence in society;
Local authorities must use electronic tools for community proposals, helping citizens to solve their problems and linking populations to politicians and decision makers.

Final conclusions:
Improve social web;
A new manual for 2010;
A new alive network for innovation regarding and involving all the people;
New ways, new targets to the projects;
Use massive collaboration for each specific propose;
Use clients as producers of e-manuals and digital contents;
Personalize for a network world, learning more and faster.
New accountability methods, questioning actual reports and evaluation routines;
Look for results with target users;
Use e-learning tools to solve environmental problems;
Civil society must be more evolved on e-learning initiatives and not only formal institutions.

FINAL PLENARY: BEYOND LISBON
Fernando Albuquerque Costa
Lisbon University

Panel:
Roberto Carneiro, Professor, Catholic University of Portugal (moderator)
Marc Rosenberg, Consultant and expert in organisational learning, elearning and knowledge management
Yves Punie, Senior Scientist, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, European Commission
Wim Veen, Professor and Director of the Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology of Delft University of Technology.

Presentation of preliminary conclusions: Conference Rapporteur Ulf Daniel Ehlers, Vice-President of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning

Introduction
The most outstanding event in Portugal in the area of Education and Training ended with a rap. A creative rap on eLearning and the challenges this new concept brings to society and to education and training in particular. A challenge primarily to the school as we know it today - anachronistic, dull and where learning, in the students point of view, lays far behind “the place we meet friends” - (Wim Veen, Session on New Digital Literacy) -, because in spite of everything, there lays hope in a better future.
Elearning is central in the European agenda and has become one of the strategic guidelines after the Lisbon Summit (2000): to make Europe the most technologically developed region in the world by 2010 (make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion".). Therefore it is only natural that it has come to assume particular relevance in the last years, transversal to all areas and in spite of different understandings and practices, seeking to prepare the citizens for an ever changing society with outlines which are difficult to predict.
How can we prepare for something we do not know? And how can eLearning contribute? This was the motto given by the conference chief rapporteur. Ulf Ehlers presented the conference preliminary conclusions and faced the panel with four challenges. For him three key ideas emerged from the conference:

• 1st. The need to accept the "change at the concepts’ level" and to understand what this change implicates (from the focus on teaching to the focus on learning and on the individuals´ active participation on the learning process; from eLearning as knowledge distribution to eLearning as interaction, collaboration, reflection and as innovation strategy and reinforcement of individual and organisational development);
  
• 2nd. The need to understand the true extension of what the “the citizens new skills” are and what they implicate from both individual (entrepreneurial skill development, learn how to learn...) and social (learning as a result and a strategy for individual and social development) points of view. Furthermore the need to valorise new perspectives on what learning means as well as new learning types (valorise informal learning investments of individuals, recognise prior learning);
  
• 3rd. The need to coordinate and integrate vertically and horizontally: vertically “bring together all stakeholders in a new dialogue on innovation through (e)Learning” and horizontally “bring together digital and social inclusion, individual and societal transformation and competitiveness”.
  In order to set the scene for the discussion Ulf Ehlers presented four challenges:
  - How can Europe be better aware of what the future needs?
  - How can the old fashioned (educational) organisations turn into revolutionary innovators?
  - How can we equip people to be better managers of their own human capital assets?
  - How can we promote access for all, improve usage skills, promote quality of usage?

These four issues will structure this report on the relevant subjects debated. In view of the the quality of the interventions and the recognized merit of the panel speakers, we will refer the ideas that due to their pertinence, innovation or vision may add value to those who decide on these matters.

Forward Looking
On this issue and regarding the preparation of the next generations Wim Veen proposes to try to anticipate the future society, imagining scenarios, being creative and disruptive. By inventing new business and jobs that not yet exist we can teach young students and adults to deal with uncertainty. Marc Rosenberg agrees that the preparation for the uncertainty of the future is a key issue in an information and knowledge based society. People need to learn how to find, verify, use and share information. The idea is to build a society where people are “good knowledge seekers and content judges”. Yves Punie outlines the importance of learning not only in the context of the skills required to live and work in a knowledge-based society but also in what it means to learn in the actual and future environments and how those skills should be developed.

About the educational organisations as innovation agents
Wim Ween defends that change must happen not only at a conceptual level but also at a more practical level where the processes that are normally used to equate the educational problems and their solutions. Wim even questions “what the school teaches and how it is organised” based on the logic of offering “the same to all” when it is now clear that this model is totally inadequate for the present days’ demands and opportunities. Why don’t classrooms make more use of the information available on the internet? This is one of the questions asked by Marc Rosenberg and it is very revealing of the school’s strong inability to keep up with the overall technological progress but especially in taking advantage of its huge pedagogical potential in the teaching and learning areas. In other words and as Marc Rosenberg emphasized it is about understanding “how knowledge can empower schools”.
Endorsing the idea that schools are obsolete Rosenberg argues that by questioning our traditional way of seeing things (“above all it is a cultural matter”) eLearning must be used to lever the desired and “absolutely indispensable” institutional changes. In Yves Punie’s opinion theses changes can be made by valuing the intuitive and informal ways of acquiring knowledge that the new tools allow (these tools are known as Web 2.0: tools for individual production on the web as weblogs, wikis, discussion forums, resource sharing systems).

About empowering individuals, each individual...
All the participants in the panel agreed with Roberto Carneiro, the panel moderator’s idea that intersubjectivity and the development of social competences based on communication and sharing between individuals are the most powerful tools of individual empowerment. Roberto Carneiro also stresses the importance of metacognitive competences as intellectual tools of critical and decisive importance in preparing the citizen to handle unthinkable quantities of information and the uncertainty of the future (Rosenberg mentions the “good consumers of information”). However it remained clear that it is not enough to make schools accountable for the acquisition of these key-competences. The panel of participants also consider of great importance each individual’s actions towards their own development going much beyond the formal learning contexts in a context of promoting the decision capacities and creativity of each citizen.

About inclusion and quality in technologies
Wim Ween defended the idea that technologies alone cannot be the purpose of school. Above all they must represent a means to enhance each one’s learning capacity. However it is not very clear how we can promote quality using technologies when – as everyone recognized – one of the main barriers is the user-friendliness of the technologies available today.
The question the panel encountered more difficulty in related with how to prepare elderly people and other less technologically skilled groups of people and provide them with key-competences for a satisfactory integration in today’s world. Concerning this issue the panel didn’t go beyond wishful thinking working on the idea of a more inclusive Europe, reducing the disparities in accessing and working with new technologies”, “more competent e people”, “self-directed learners”, people who will have at their availability “more intuitive technologies”...

To conclude
The opinions of a group of young European students on school and technologies were an interesting opportunity to discus and reaffirm the main ideas put forward by the panel on the role of technologies concerning learning and the contribution of school for more active and creative citizens in order to build a better future.

Lisbon, October 20th 2007