The current scenario of the ICT learning systems, technologies and methodologies has several drawbacks, as emphasised in the report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament "Designing tomorrow's education promoting innovation with new technologies" (27/1/2000). The most important of these include:

• Poor interoperability among ICT learning systems. This is due to the absence of widely adopted standards in data representation (learning materials) and the use of proprietary systems.
• Difficulty in adopting new advanced learning methodologies such as experience-based approaches (e.g. learning by doing). These new pedagogical approaches are strongly interactive and are typically based on a rich mix of multimedia (visualisation, simulation, enhanced reality, etc.). Obstacles include: lack of transparent access to sophisticated tools and large structured data repositories, weaknesses in network infrastructure and bandwidth, and poor software integration and cooperation on the Web.

A European Learning Grid Infrastructure can address these drawbacks through the co-operative use of geographically distributed computing and educational resources as a single e-learning environment. Such an infrastructure will allow a choice of pedagogical methods, multimedia contents, and innovative technological solutions while bringing about new innovative learning strategies to satisfy the demands of lifelong learning and ever changing new specialised skills in the volatile European market. From a technological perspective, Grid technologies are the most promising approach to realising an infrastructure that will allow learning process actors to collaborate, to use and share high quality learning data and to innovate solutions for learning and training. Ultimately, a European Learning Grid Infrastructure constitutes an innovative and powerful enabling solution to exploit emerging pedagogical approaches based on interactive and inductive-simulative models.

From an organisational perspective, the model of a European Learning Grid Infrastructure is composed of several nodes, each providing a specific service or access to a set of well defined learning object or solution repositories. The Learning Grid will be organised in an hierarchical manner with at least two levels: the European and the National level. This approach can also be understood as an attempt to realise a virtual network of Centres of Excellence in Higher Education and knowledge areas as presented in the vision of ERA (European Research Area initiative).

We believe that this combination of a need for strategic research coupled with mechanisms for rapid deployment and realisation of research outputs, demonstration and outreach activities, makes the area of Grid computing for e-Learning appropriate for a thematic network proposal under the IST programme. We are therefore proposing for an interdisciplinary Working Group to be established in order to promote the establishment of a European Learning Grid Infrastructure by facilitating rapid experimentation and a high level of interaction between the different actors in the formative process.

The Working Group aims at facilitating the collaboration in IST fields (Grid technologies and e-Learning) between research groups from industry, academia and public sector organisations. It therefore conforms with the IST support activities action plan, with the 2002 work programme and with the incoming scenario of FP6 where the use of several new emerging technologies for learning such as Grid and the use of emerging didactical methodologies are some of the key factors