This paper focuses on a follow-up study that the present author is conducting on the European Commission's eLearning Programme. The eLearning Programme, which was deployed between 2001 and 2006 and was later absorbed within the more comprehensive Lifelong Learning Programme, funded a total of 152 e-learning projects. One of the fundamental requirements for e-learning projects to be accepted under the Programme was that they form Pan-European institutional partnerships involving at least three different countries. Normally, only one institution from one country was entrusted with the responsibility to coordinate such a consortium. In most cases, one person from the coordinating institution was designated as the project manager or coordinator. With this study I am investigating the experience of project coordinators with the conditions of the eLearning Programme and their perspective on how their projects fared given the financial, administrative and logistical support they received during their projects from European, national and institutional levels.
More specifically, one of the pivotal questions asked of project coordinators is to provide input on their motivations to accept the task of coordinating projects under the Programme (for instance, the opportunity to learn and disseminate information about e-learning best practices in Europe, the possibility of forming partnerships or networks of collaboration, etc.). The participants are asked to report on the most and least rewarding aspects of their involvement in their projects, and to supply information on the extent to which the partnerships into which they entered via the Programme have produced the type of collaboration they had envisioned.
The study further probes the coordinators’ impression of the administrative requirements for obtaining the necessary funding from the Commission as well as from their particular institutions in order to launch and sustain their projects. An instrumental research question that reflects the impact of the eLearning Programme on the Commission’s efforts to advance ICT in education is directed towards eliciting responses from the coordinators as to whether their projects are sustainable once the funding received through the eLearning Programme ends.
While the study is presently underway, the preliminary results received so far show that the project coordinators place the highest value on the e-learning knowledge that has been created and shared with partners from the consortia formed through the projects. The development of best practices in e-learning and the establishment of European partnership count as the next most rewarding aspects of their involvement in the projects. At the same time, the project coordinators seem to lament in equal measure the time spent on administrative procedures and the limited duration of the funding provided by the eLearning Programme.
Full results of this study are expected to be released by the end of the summer 2008 and the final report will be available before the ICERI 2008 Conference.