The Ambient eLearning EU Project

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By Edward White
Sales and Marketing Assistant
The Language Technology Centre Ltd.

ewhite@langtech.co.uk
http://www.langtech.co.uk

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PRESS RELEASE

11th November 2004
London, UK

The Ambient eLearning EU Project

The Language Technology Centre (www.langtech.co.uk) and Computer Publication Group Ltd (www.cpg.ie) in collaboration with Software Information Designs Ltd (www.sid2u.com) have commenced a project that is aimed at providing a pragmatic, easy-to-use multilingual eLearning service, which allows any time, anywhere and anyhow access to personalised, high quality learning content.

Background for the Project

The reason for the need to improve eLearning services is based on independent research conducted by separate institutes and governmental authorities:

• A survey commissioned by the European Directorate General Education and Culture, called "Lifelong learning: a citizen’s view" identified the main obstacles to lifelong learning: time and money. "Although European citizens recognise the personal and social benefits of learning, they underline that lack of time due to job and family commitments is an important obstacle. [...] This suggests that implementing lifelong learning effectively must find ways to enable people to combine activities in ways that suit them practically and personally."
• According to recent studies by IT Skills Research Programme and consulting firm Ovum Holway the take-up of eLearning in Europe has been rather slow.
• The Survey report 2002 "Quality and eLearning in Europe" revealed some disastrous facts about eLearning: "61% of all respondents rated the overall quality of eLearning negatively - as 'fair' or 'poor'. Only 1% rated it 'excellent' and only 5% rated it 'very good'." The report is based on a web-based survey with 433 respondents that was carried across Europe.

The main barriers for successful take-up and deployment of eLearning are:

• Fear of miss-investment due to lack of established solutions, companies, standards etc.
• Lack of time for elearning
• Lack of expertise to use eLearning solution
• Inadequate accessibility (barrier free access) and usability (interoperability)
• Lack of a customised, tailored elearning service
• Failure to integrate eLearning with the work and life process
• Inadequate (restricted) low-quality learning content
• Doubts about eLearning benefits and expected expensiveness of eLearning solution.

Project Objectives

The AMBIENT LEARNING project addresses the established barriers and issues. Its prime objective is to provide a pragmatic, easy-to-use eLearning service, which allows any time, anywhere and anyhow access to personalised, high quality learning content in multiple languages. Its secondary objective is to validate the provision by demonstrating the various services in five European (Italy, Germany, Greece, UK/Ireland) regions and therefore preparing the ground for successful market deployment.

Service provision

AMBIENT LEARNING is an eLearning web-service, which allows to use “any content” (from articles out of magazines, Internet articles up to SCORM [Shareable Content Object Reference Model] based eLearning solutions) and deliver it to the user based on the user context (time-, location-, device-dependent). The Service provision is based on stable and mature technology and offers ambient, multimodal, personalised and context-sensitive access to learning at work, at home, at a training institution or on the move.

The AMBIENT LEARNING service will form a real trans-European service and after the successful completion of the market validation. The service will be available at an affordable price per user in order to support the European citizens. Three different use cases will demonstrate the technology and service of the project in key European regions (UK and Ireland, Germany, Greece, Italy).

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