Successful Year for eLearning in Europe
Essen (GER), February 2010 - The year 2009 was a very successful year for European eLearning standardization. Three new standardization projects were started, and as the highlight, the first European de-jure standard was published. "We are very pleased that the first official European Norm (EN) for eLearning was approved in consensus last year!", explains Christian M. Stracke, Vice-Chair of the European eLearning standardization body CEN/TC 353.
"Since its establishment, more and more national delegations have joined the CEN/TC 353, which is gaining increased recognition, collaboration, and impact", adds Mike Collett, Chair of CEN/TC 353 since the beginning.
This first European Norm is the adoption of the international ISO quality standard as EN ISO/IEC 19796-1. This quality standard provides the reference process framework RFDQ for quality assurance and management in learning, education, and training for both learning providers and users. It is applicable for any kind of learning scenario and all educational sectors from K-12, over vocational and higher education, up to lifelong learning and training.
The international ISO quality standard ISO/IEC 19796-1 has already achieved several hundred adaptations and applications worldwide and has been adopted as a national standard in numerous countries, in particular in Asia. With the approval of European Norm EN ISO/IEC 19796-1, all national standards within the 31 CEN's member states are automatically withdrawn and replaced. This will strengthen the standard's use in Europe and the quality of learning, education, and training in general, too.
The European standardization committee CEN/TC 353 is currently working on three new standards: CEF, MLO, and ELM.
The Curriculum Exchange Format (CEF) will define a data model for exchanging and mapping curriculum information for use in controlled vocabularies for metadata and to provide navigation structures in user interfaces.
Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) is a multi-part standard. Its first part, called MLO-AD, addresses metadata adequate for advertising a learning opportunity. It ensures that learners get the information about learning opportunities needed for comparison and decision making.
The third standardization project is called European Learner Mobility (ELM). An ambitious multi-part standard, ELM aims to harmonize and integrate existing European policies and specifications (like EQF, Europass, ECTS, and others including MLO in the future) by developing an overarching general framework to strengthen learner mobility and education throughout Europe in general.
The first part will provide an application profile of the Europass Diploma Supplement for transparent interpretation and recognition of academic and professional qualifications across the diverse European educational systems.
The European standardization committee CEN/TC 353 was established in May 2007 in Milan, organized by the Italian Secretariat. It meets with all national delegations on a bi-annual basis. The next plenary will take place in Brussels on 20 April 2010 in collocation with the CEN Workshop for Learning Technologies the day before.
