Objectives

Primary Scientific and Technological Objectives

In summary the main goals of LeGE-WG are:

To identify and help demonstrate how a Learning Grid will allow a European-wide exploitation of key skills and address the lifelong learning needs of citizens in the modern volatile European market.
To facilitate the cross-disciplinary investigation of technological, pedagogic and legislative issues underpinning the creation and establishment of a European Learning Grid.
To facilitate the definition of Learning Grid toolkits and design methodologies, while supporting the emergence of pedagogic paradigms based on the utilisation of GRID technologies.
To prepare the ground for a European Centre of Excellence which will be coordinating a wide-scale validation of a European Learning Grid through the adoption of new learning paradigms based on experimentation (learning by doing) through the access to real world, real time data sets (e.g. stock market or meteorology data), virtual laboratories, and virtual scientific experiments for learning.
To facilitate the integration of the best European leading research Learning and Training solutions and digital resources into Learning Portals.
To facilitate the harmonisation of regulatory and legislative frameworks and facilitate their evolution so as to support the fast take-up of emerging Grid-aware solutions for e-Learning.
To prepare the ground for the standardisation of emerging Grid-aware solutions for e-Learning by submitting recommendations to the appropriate standardisation bodies.

Operational Objectives

LeGE-WG will provide the consortium partners and the wider research community with the common background necessary for advancing toward an in-depth understanding of the offerings and challenges associated with the application of Grid computing for Learning and Training. This will lead to the definition of a number of closely interacting research, development and demonstration projects focusing in different aspects of European Learning Grid, from complementary perspectives.

In particular, LeGE-WG is intended to prepare the ground for in-depth research activities through a series of preparatory actions, which include:

the establishment of an information portal with up-to-date information about the latest research developments towards a European Learning Grid,
regular working group meetings in conjunction with targeted workshops, and
the organisation of international workshops where experts from non-EU countries will also be invited to lecture and participate.
To prepare a bridge toward FP6.

LeGE-WG operate workshops and other dissemination events as a large European-wide network of Actors that are able to validate, exploit and disseminate project results to more than 100,000 potential users (over 20 partners among Universities, Schools, Research Centre, Enterprises and Public Administrations in 10 EU and NAS countries).

Target Groups

Target groups include, without being restricted to, the European Higher Education community, the European Scientific and Engineering Research communities, the Engineering and IT industry, the European Health and Public sectors, the Financial sector. The relevance of the LeGE-WG theme to these communities will be advocated in the LeGE-WG workshops and further illustrated in the final public event by means of showcases providing Learning GRID experimental scenarios. Particular attention will given to the following innovative concepts (elaborated in B5.1):

eCalculus: How to provide IT affordances for the teaching of calculus around the world using tools such as simulations, virtual reality, and support for mathematics experimentation.
eLaboratory: How to provide to provide effective access mechanism to the public data of large-scale scientific experiments and allow for "virtual experiments" to take place through simulation and enhanced reality tools.
eHospital: How to provide high-quality and affordable training to medical professionals around the world based on interactive and inductive-simulative didactical models.
eIndustry: How to provide training for the next generation of engineers based on inductive-simulative didactical models and using immersive VR, distributed knowledge management and collaborative learning technologies.
eTrade: How to provide to the next generation of economists an understanding of economical models through the use of interactive market simulations based on distributed repositories of historical financial (e.g. stock-market) data.