The Dawn of Distance Learning e-Infrastructure

When the Lisbon Agenda was released in 2000, it called upon Europe “to improve quality and effectiveness of EU education systems; ensure that they are accessible to all students and educators; open up education to the wider world.”
Further to this, the European Commission appointed a High Level Group on Human Resources for Science and Technology, chaired by José Mariano Gago. This group found that Europe needs to find an additional 600,000 science, engineering and technology experts, resulting in an increase in the average European GDP dedicated to research from 2% in 2004 to 3% by 2010. The subsequent Gago Report identified specific actions or policy measures that, within the context of the European Research Area, could help towards this goal.
Increased spending by government and industry on R&D is one way to combat the skills shortage; another approach is to focus on science education itself. Whether you look at higher or secondary education, schools are increasingly challenged by rapid developments—facilitated by dramatic advances in information technology—in natural sciences, engineering and technology. Education theory has not yet adjusted to this digital trend of the information age. The result is an ever-growing disparity between standard educational methods and tools, and the new ‘digital’ abilities of modern learners, who live in a world of exploding knowledge. Today’s students communicate using MSN, share their media on YouTube and meet new friends on FaceBook. Is it unusual that they expect a similar experience from their school or university?
Key to improving the image of science and technology, especially among young people, is the integration of education with e-Infrastructures: ‘Virtual classrooms’ will allow students and educators to collect and link information and training sources; students will then choose and use their preferred tools to work with this information, enabling personalised learning and producing the desired educational results. In modern e-Classrooms, students and scientists will be able to access Web portals for scientific compute and data infrastructures, accessing large collections of data and digital objects using metadata, knowledge management techniques, and specific data services. Students and teachers will apply existing scalable Web and grid technologies to access and share scientific data, using educational and computing resources to run scientific application simulations. Such an approach will allow the creation of interactive and multimediaenriched learning modules that interactively support the exploration of scientific phenomena. Advanced repository and collaboration services will allow students to remotely and securely up- and download science and engineering learning objects. The larger science community will add new learning modules and computer simulation-based learning objects as they come available. An open and Web-based community will capitalize on the ‘collective intelligence’ of students, educators, and scientists, using Web 2.0 communication and collaboration tools.
In this new world of personalised and interactive e-learning, teachers will play the essential role of cooperatively guiding students as they identify and use the new tools of their education: these tools will be well devised, edutaining, and able to provide deep insight in specific areas of science. Only then, when the digital world is fully integrated into the education system, will our young people feel an increased motivation to learn. Only then, will they become interested in and attracted to the many fields of science and engineering.