Bonn (GER), March - An in-depth country report on eLearning in Portugal is available through the European Project eUSER's website. The research report was compiled by Gonçalo de Sousa Santinha of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, who collected qualitative and quantitative information from national sources.


Major themes that are elaborated in the report include:

• Main suppliers of adult education
• The role of traditional distance education in the country
• National policies for fostering eLearning
• Current supply of eLearning courses (and related services)
• eLearning take-up by enterprises/employers
• Overall supply-demand match with regard to eLearning in the country

As a general observation, the country report states that the eLearning market in Portugal is still at a very early stage of development. There is no policy specifically addressing eLearning, very few companies have adopted eLearning, and in general no eLearning courses are available in the adult education/training sector.

In the education and training domains, the governmental efforts related to the Information Society are mostly focused on providing access conditions to the use of ICTs and on supplying the population with the basic skills for using ICTs.

Despite the non-existence of a national policy or strategy of eLearning, there is a public entity that carries out relevant work on the development and establishment of rules and standards for eLearning services (including certification of enterprises in the field of training and e-training). The IQF (Institute for Quality in Training) is a public institute with responsibilities for the "strategic support to the training entities and trainers" for which it "develops projects and partnerships that aspire to build a training system more structured, qualified, and adapted to the needs of people and organisations".

Conclusive findings drawn from the study "Evolution of eLearning in Portugal-context and perspectives" are:

• The Information Society in Portugal is not yet developed enough to ensure a wide-spread take-up of eLearning. However, some evidence can be found of a growing dynamic that is favourable to the development of this method of education and training;
• The flaws or imperfections of the supply side are still many, and the information flow is deficient. Organisations and individual learners do not yet recognise sufficient added value in the existent supply to stimulate take-up of eLearning. The adult population's ICT literacy is at a low level, which has direct consequences for the preferred solutions for education and training. The access costs for broadband connections are very high, and the service quality provided to the end-user is still low.
• The potential demand for distance learning and eLearning in Portugal is high. The necessities for innovation and modernisation of the initial education systems are evident. The lifelong-learning training schemes also represent a virtually endless ground for action. The foreseen scenarios for the needed improvement in educational and training skills of the Portuguese population points to annual minimum investments of 1.5-2.5% of the GDP for the next twenty years.