Finally, I'm at UNIVAP/Urbanova. Surprisingly, no laptops in the auditorium, so far. Maybe a couple of Blackberrys, but that's it. Restricted wireless access, by the way. You would expect to have open access in an event like this one.

EADTU (www.eadtu.nl): Lifelong open and flexible learning (LOF).

Bullet-style presentation. In English, with a translator…

Single mode universities: 100% distance education. Athabasca y TELUQ are associated with EADTU.
Dual mode across Europe.

Driving forces: Bologna, Lisbon Strategy (??), lifelong learning, internationalization, educational technology, global development.

Task forces: Virtual mobility, eLearning QA & Benchmarking, EPICS (European portal for international courses and services -check!-), funding & researching LOF, sustainability…

Looks like this people makes no difference between distance learning and e-Learning…

Principles: Interactivity, flexibility, accessibility…

Requirements: Learner centered Pedagogy, curriculum & course design & organization, pedagogical services. The most important thing is not the platform, but the learning processes involved.

Virtual mobility: Erasmus mobility: Take a course, take a module, international learning communities, support for physical mobility, virtual internship, virtual libraries. Funny thing: Some of these amazing "innovative" projects sound just like the kind of collaborative projects that you have found in Kidlink, for example, all these years… Higher Education is definitely walking a very slow path...

OER: MIT OCW, OpenLearn (UKOU), MORIL (??). They seems to be developing Multilingual educational resources. He calls "second generation", resources which include learning activities, in addition to content. Go figure, our LO definition is "second generation"… The difference is that they seem to be working a lot in localization of the resources (they are using 10 languages, it seems). They have an operational plan, and they are working now on its implementation.. But this is only multilingual, not multicultural approaches. They talk only about localization. If the institution that translates wants to include cultural aspects, it's their choice.

What about the intellectual property issues of these materials?

Are these resources synchronized? In a centralized LOR?

MORIL stands for Multilingual Open Educational Resources.

Task force: QA Assurance & Accreditation: Develop a core of facets, criteria parameters and procedures for QA for LOF learning/e-Learning.

E-xcellence (??): Set of 33 european benchmarks (which ones?) Who knows about this? Who could talk about this? They say the have manuals, books, etc.

Time's up. Not a very good time management strategy, so the presentation is over in the middle of it. The presenter says that the information is on the Web. If that is the case, what was the point of the talk?

That was Mr. Piet Henderikx, General Secretary, European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), talking about Current trends on Virtual Education in Europe.

So far, nothing that I'm not aware of, at least in the conceptual sense. A lot of common places, sometimes oxymoron.. I have yet to see the Downes, Leinonen, Wiley, Warlick characters in this conference...