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The European Commission's Opening up Education initiative in a nutshell
The main goal of this initiative is to stimulate ways of learning and teaching through ICT and digital content, mainly through the development and availability of OER. Amongst its actions, the most important one is to change the role of digital technologies at school. All the actions within the initiative are put in place with the hope that they help attain the ultimate objective, namely to boost competitiveness and growth at the European level.
Opening up Educationcalls for EU-level cooperation to push reforms towards the adoption of open learning environments as drivers to enhance digital skills both for pupils and teachers, and in education in general. Another major concern of the European Commission, stated in this initiative and in alignment with the Open Education Europa portal, is to be able to support the deployment and availability of digital technology and content.
This initiative addresses several educational difficulties at the European level. Europe is falling behind in the digital sphere; the great majority of schools are not digitally equipped and their students are not taught by digitally confident teachers, rather teachers who mainly use ICT to prepare their teaching but not as a skill for students to develop in the classroom. In the background, remains the threat of facing a new digital divide between those who have access to innovative, tech-based education and the digitally excluded.
The solution lays in open technologies that grant access to education for everyone and allow:
- students to build knowledge from open and free sources other than their teachers and institutions, and with different methods;
- everyone to engage in learning/study groups, thus creating learning communities beyond their classrooms; make personalisation and customisation of education a much easier task;
- teachers to create communities of practice to exchange teaching materials and best practices; provide access to a wider range of educational resources across borders and languages.
The actions foreseen in this initiative hope to enable Europe to gain leadership in education, attract new talent, train its citizens with the relevant skills, and as a consequence fuel innovation, productivity and growth.
The Open Education Europa portal: a key player to improve visibility of high-quality European OER
The main goal of the Open Education Europa portal is to grant access to all existing high-quality European OER repositories in different languages in order to make them easily accessible for learners, teachers and researchers. The ultimate aim is to be able to foster the wide use and creation of OER in several languages, for all educational sectors and disciplines, and to help overcome the current fragmentation of European OER use.

The European Commission launched Open Education Europa in September 2013 as part of the Opening Up Education initiative to provide a single gateway to European OER. This portal is grounded on the basis of the elearningeuropa.info portal, active since 2002 to support the transformation of education through technology. Today, with close to 38,000 registered users and an average of 55,000 monthly visits, it has become the meeting point for exploring change and innovation in education.
The main goal of the Open Education Europa portal is to offer access to all existing European Open Educational Resources in different languages in order to be able to present them to learners, teachers and researchers.
Open Education Europa is a dynamic platform built with the latest cutting-edge open-source technology, offering tools for communicating, sharing and discussing. The portal is structured in 3 main sections:
• The FIND section showcases MOOCs, courses, and Open Educational Resources by leading European institutions. Each institution is also featured in this section alongside the MOOCs, courses, and the Open Educational Resources it provides.
• The SHARE section is the space where portal users (scholars, educators, policymakers, students and other stakeholders) come together to share and discuss solutions for a diverse range of educational issues by posting blogs, sharing events, and engaging in thematic discussions.
• The IN-DEPTH section hosts eLearning Papers — the world’s most visited e-journal on open education and new technologies —, provides an exhaustive list of EU-funded projects, and highlights the latest news about open education as well as the most relevant recently published scholarly articles.
Please take the time to register and explore the many options the platform offers, and let us know of any improvements you would like to see. We look forward to welcoming you into the Open Education Europa community!

Last week intergenerational learning (IGL) stakeholders met in the framework of the Generations in Action (GO-ACT) project with the aim to discuss the feasibility and necessity of creating a network on IGL.
Representatives from the main networks on IGL in the European Union, adult education practitioners and project developers, representatives from the Youth sector and the GO-ACT project partners, including EAEA, gathered together with the GO-ACT project coordinator and leading expert (Professor Edeltraud Röbe) and discussed ideas and views on the IGL in Europe. The meeting was chaired by Renate Heinisch, Chair of the Baden-Württemberg Parents' Association, former member of the European Parliament (1994-1999) and actual EESC representative on behalf of the Federal Association of German Senior Citizens' Organisations (BAGSO). More...

By Michael Voss. Enthusiasm for learning is the goal. But enthusiasm is also an important tool for raising awareness of adult learning. And enthusiasm certainly was present at the conference on Awareness Raising in Adult Learning and Education (ARALE).
The conference took place in Brussels on October 2 and 3 with around 70 participants from 20 European countries plus Israel and Japan. At the conference the results of a survey on EAEA-members´ awareness raising activities were presented, debated and not the least: new experiences and viewpoints were added. The survey is part of the ARALE project. Suite...