Other socio-Economic aspects of the innovations
E-learning
standards
Content and technical standards need to be adopted that
will optimise interoperability with other institutions in areas
such as the creation of learning databases, information databases
such as libraries, administrative systems and learner support
strategies as well as the facilitation of interactions among learners
and teachers. Building an educational repository that provides
access to learning objects requires standards and structures
that can facilitate object storage, retrieval and aggregation
to suit the needs off learners or the pedagogical intentions of
instructional developers.
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Intercultural awareness can be developed through distributed
collaboration as information and experience are exchanged about
local environments, structures of institutions and civic and cultural
protocols. Multilingual presentations is not a problem at one
level. It is the enormous resources required to transform and
translate content into a range of languages. It is however unclear
that where partner institutions operate within a limited international
range and where there is little previous experience of different
cultures how within projects such as these there is enough time
for analysis of, reflection on and experience of differing cultural
biases.
It is recognised that networking can
provide a European dimension, sharing international learning
experience in education and training by cross-border delivery
of courses. A sense of community for the students from
different countries working together on e-learning projects usually
emerges. It gives educators, trainers and learners with different
worldviews the opportunity to exchange ideas and information and
learn from each other, thus expanding each participant’s global
view and gaining a broader perspective on a specific subject as
well as on the world in general. It helps to develop the habit
of intercultural communication for learning and non-learning
purposes, so raising tolerance for difference and inter-cultural
awareness and broadening or breaching cultural, social, and political
boundaries.
Funding
& commercialisation
In other sectors the situation is not
much different. Many students in upper-secondary adult education usually do not
have the financial means for top-level IT-equipment and fast internet-connections.
Implementing and servicing electronic learning managements systems
(LMS) has proved a task far too ambitious for an average sized
school: Running a server with a LMS has to be outsourced and serviced
by experts to guarantee a reliable and working system, including
a hotline and support for teachers and students alike.
In general it is assumed that the integration of new technologies will enable the
university to position itself in the market more successfully
not only at the level of undergraduate education but also in the
field of lifelong learning. It is more and more important the extension
of the student group to the mature student in the framework
of open learning, continuing education and/or lifelong learning. |