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Background

Most European universities are adapted to educate students on-campus after they have left school to prepare them for their professional life. These students form relatively homogeneous groups that have similar curricula that share many experiences and are able to discuss problems and solutions within their study and campus life.

Changing Demands

This type of education excludes students that have restrictions concerning time or location and is not very suitable for acquiring specific qualifications without taking a complete study program; this means it is often not really adapted to part-time students and people that are looking for vocational training.

New Challenges

However, rapidly changing technologies and vocational demands require highly specialized skills that need to be renewed frequently. Therefore continued education and lifelong learning will become more and more important. Yet professionals can hardly join traditional university education among others because:

• absences of qualified personnel are expensive,
• waiting for adequate training courses may delay projects,
• courses are usually not custom-designed to the actual needs of an enterprise.

ICT-Based Teaching

Information and communication technologies (ICT) and the growth of the Internet help to build global learning infrastructures that overcome some of the limitations of traditional education by remote information, administration, communication, distribution of digital course material, and access to digital libraries.