| areas: | School and Vocational Education; Universities and Higher Education; Company and Workforce Training |
| issues: | Staff Development; Developing Countries; Take off Countries |
| aspects: | multi-/trans-/international; institutional; sectorial |
Skills and knowledge are key factors in enhancing productivity and competitiveness in modern society. The revolution of ICT has profoundly affected the human resources development sector. ICT is an essential part in some of our current development projects, where the aim is to improve both learners' and educators' competence in ICT as well as to improve the management of ICT in education. Distance education and e-learning seem to offer possibilities for empowering individuals and social groups, avoiding social exclusion, promoting participation and facilitating life-long learning.
In addition to the distance learning component included in our ongoing projects, we are establishing an e-learning environment of our own as part of a more general process of developing as a learning organisation.
We intend to proceed in this direction in three phases. We have begun with introducing an IDLE (Integrated Distributed Learning Environment) into our daily work in our home office. We believe that it will serve us as an instrument of increasing the quality of our activities and an environment of true collaboration. In the second phase we will pilot the environment in our projects as a training environment and a forum of professional development for our experts. During phase three, we will launch the environment to serve as a tool in our HRD projects. We also utilise the research and development potential of our home office staff and our experts to provide new services and products to our clients at home and overseas. We are convinced that the e-learning environment will be of great value to the end-users of our international development projects and will ultimately contribute towards overcoming the digital divide.