Brussels, 03/05/2001 (Agence Europe) - On the occasion of the public hearing organised by the EP's Education Committee in which Commissioner Viviane Reding took part, Mario Mauro MEP (Italy, EPP-ED) presented his report entitled "E-Learning - Designing Tomorrow's Education". This report will be examined by the European Parliament in Strasbourg at its second May session.
By adopting the Mauro Report, the Parliamentary Committee calls mainly on Member States to make efforts at filling the gap between those with access to new technologies and those without, and to define priority actions for specific groups (minorities, the elderly, the disabled, people with few qualifications), as well as women.
The report considers it essential that the objective of Lisbon aimed at equipping all EU schools with access to the internet by end 2001 be actually achieved and that, by end-2002, all teachers have rapid access to the Internet, as well as multimedia resources for their didactic activities in classes. It states that each schoolchild or student must be able to have an electronic address in their establishment. Mr. Mauro proposes promoting low access tariffs for the Internet in learning establishments. The report calls on: 1) Member States to provide for the training, by end2002, of the largest possible number of teachers to enable them to use the Internet, high-speed trans-European networks for scientific communications in different languages, data bases and multimedia resources to arrive, by end-2003, at a genuine global "digital culture" including the in-depth ability to criticize the educational impact and values relating to the use of new systems of electronic communications; 2) the European Commission to: - continue to back European networks such as "Schoolnet" and establish monitoring indicators of the eLearning initiative; - adopt proposals aimed at defining new basic skills (technical culture, foreign languages , etc.) so as to create a European diploma on information technologies applied to teaching.