Going the Distance with e-Learning

The communication of knowledge in this society without distances is causing the rise of a new reality that is characterised by the fact that the quantity of information available outside the 'school and university structures' makes the learning of knowledge and competencies happen also outside traditional educational and training structures. Anybody can learn from those who feed the communication networks. The process, enhanced by telecommunication technologies, tends to build a pedagogical society inside the knowledge society and to develop a new market: the market of educational contents. Many initiatives related to e-learning are developing a new productive sector, the knowledge industry, which is going to witness a significant development worldwide. In this context, universities, as the only place where production and transfer processes co-exist, can acquire a significant and crucial role in producing contents to be put on telecommunications networks and should become the protagonists of this market. But, to make this happen, it is necessary to establish new systems, new public policies facilitating the development of new organisational models for universities at a local, national and international level, and allow the universities to create new international alliances and new real and virtual spaces, in order to create shared knowledge networks among the different universities in the world and support co-operation among institutions. There is a risk, in case it does not happen, of a progressive decay of the traditional educational structures. We will witness an out-of-control process leading to a more deschooling society. The agencies external to the traditional educational institutions and the software producers will be in charge of creating, for the citizens, new competencies required by the knowledge society. Therefore, the problem is no longer if education reproduces social inequalities or not, but today, the question, common to all universities worldwide, is how to adapt themselves to this system and create, inside the framework of a globalised economy, systems that could develop integrated teaching and learning processes, since they use different languages to communicate knowledge; they should also be open processes since they should have no spatio-temporal limits. University systems that can develop an educational and training space 'intra muros' and 'extra muros' so as to give students the possibility to attend the university both face to face and distance. In this new setting, the distance university is not an alternative to the traditional university, but it represents a new way to make traditional universities carry out their teaching and research functions, and make them re-acquire a new vitality in the cognitive society, characterised by the specificity of the technologies especially affecting the knowledge processing and its transfer, in order to help universities developing system, process and products innovation.