Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 75

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
(EADTU)) (Dehaene & Brannon, 2011). As an example, we share the modifications that
Aberta University, a public, four-year online university has implemented toward continuing
Portugal’s pioneering efforts in the field of online teaching. Using practical examples and
theoretical discussions, we will present a vision of what we believe will be the future of
education and the role online education will play in this vision.
The Current State of Technology Integration in Europe
The reform of higher education in Europe can currently be seen as a “reform of the
reform”, i.e, as the reform of the democratic access to the universities. This democratic
access took place in most European countries within the last 30 years of the twentieth
century and resulted in a dramatic increase of students attending higher educational
universities. Today, one of the main educational goals in Europe is not only to increase the
number of students attending universities, but also to ensure the quality and relevance of
their qualifications upon graduation and throughout the remainder of their careers.
Education is viewed as being a continuous process throughout life, therefore the question
becomes, how do we make better educational policies for better lives? (Freedman, 2005).
Undoubtedly, the question above is being addressed by universities all over the
world, as efforts to redesign infrastructures to accommodate the multiple forms of constantly
emerging technologies has taken center stage (Layne & Ice, 2015). In Europe, for example,
these modifications being made in higher educational universities stem from the immediacy
by which European legal and political systems began integrating emerging technologies into
their internal policies and infrastructures. Because the EU starts from a commerce-based
association, the European Economical Community (EEC), the legal systems were integrated
by policymakers before the European integration of universitary systems, but the
universitary integration across the EU is already an on-going process (Groenwegen & Van
Dijck, 1993; Buchholz, 1989). The European legal system as a whole was designed to make
sure that commerce would transform the EU into the most developed world area. It was the
European Council of Lisbon (the political EU leading body) in 2000 that established the EU
policy for science and development, and declared as one of its goals the establishment in the
EU of the world’s most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy (EU, 2002).
The intention of developing a digital EU society supported on tools and methodologies of
the online education approach is proposed in the Europe 2020: Europe’s growth strategy
document produced in 2013 (EC, 2011). To understand the impact that such changes will
have in the academic sphere within European societies, e.g. the growing gap between the
high budget universities and the low budget universities, it is necessary to analyze what
initially served as the catalyst for these changes (Steiner, 2009; Castells, 2005). Some
technological developments are simply products that have been improved. For example, it is
simpler now to print the text that we write, e.g. using a personal laser printer, but the
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