The Lifelong Learning paradigm recognises that, in a knowledge-based economy, education and work are integrated throughout people’s lives. All citizens need ongoing access to learning to enable them to work. Technology is playing an increasing role in mediating this learning. However, if this technology is inappropriate and introduced with insufficient support, disabled people will face even further exclusion from the interlinked worlds of education and work. To address this, EU4ALL sets forward the concept of Accessible Lifelong Learning (ALL) uniting 3 key strategies:

  • That the technology that mediates lifelong learning does so accommodating the diversity of ways people interact with technology and the content and services it delivers.
  • That this technology is used to bring support services to disabled learners.
  • Providing support services and technical infrastructure that enable teaching, technical and administrative staff of educational institutions to offer their teaching and services in a way that is accessible to disabled learners
    The aim of EU4ALL is to improve the efficiency and efficacy of implementing these strategies by developing an open service architecture for ALL. To achieve a wide impact the approach taken is not to develop a single EU4ALL system but a standard-based framework that facilitates the integration of the approach with a wide range of eLearning systems.

More specifically the goals of EU4ALL are to:

  • Design an open service-oriented architecture for ALL.
  • Develop the software infrastructure for ALL services (including content, support and access services).
  • Validate the results in large-scale higher education settings.

aDeNu group is the Scientific Coordinator of EU4ALL integrated project, and thus manages the integration accross the different subprojects involved. Moreover, it leads the Open and Accessible Services Architecture subproject and two subprojects, which are the User Modelling and Recommending Systems, and the Psychological support (here with the collaboration of the Psychology Faculty at UNED). Moreover, one of the two large pilots for the evaluation is located at UNED and will be run on dotLRN platform supporting the EU4ALL approach.

  • Project title European Unified Approach for Accessible Lifelong learning (EU4ALL)
  • Funded by European Commision (Priority 2 "Information Society Technologies", 6th Framework Programme)
  • Project Identifier
  • Duration From 2006 to 2010