| NETWORK NEWS |
| Sixth Edition June 2006 |
| EDITORIAL |
by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Johannes Wildt Dear eCompetence and eLearning actors, Welcome to the Sixth Edition of our European eCompetence newsletter. Finally we have published our eCompetence book "The Challenge of eCompetence in Academic Staff Development", which presents 24 contributions from all over Europe and even one contribution from South Africa. Next to conceptual backgrounds, the book focuses on institutional staff training measures and approaches to individual eCompetence development. We hope that the book contains interesting findings to all actors, which are involved in academic staff development and building support and infrastructure for eLearning in their universities. As the book is published under the Creative Commons licence, you are free to download all contributions from our website. The fourth eCompetence symposium has taken place in March at the University of Dortmund, embedded into an International Conference on Academic Staff Development. We have seen excellent presentations from eLearning experts, including Gilly Salmon from Leicester, Jan Elen and Wim Van Petegem from Leuven, Michael Kerres from Duisburg - Essen, Iain Mc Labhrainn from Galway, Hans Boon from Pretoria, and Dieter Euler from St. Gallen, to mention only a few. All presentations and a summary of all eCompetence sessions is also available at our website. Although we have analysed and learned a lot already on eCompetence, much remains to be done. In educational research, there is a continued strong interest in competence development and management, as well in as competence assessment methods. eCompetence combines educational questions on how competence can be developed with questions on technological innovation and its impact on educational institutions and structures. The research outcomes in our project can serve as basis for further and more fundamental follow-up investigations on this important topic in the European higher education landscape. We will present our reflections in a workshop at the EDEN 2006 conference in Vienna. The conference title, is by the way, "E-Competences for Life, Employment and Innovation", which underlines the relevance of our topic. Best regards,
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THE QUEST FOR eCOMPETENT ACADEMIC STAFF: THE UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA AS A CASE STUDY by Jill Fresen, Dolf Steyn and Alta Marx, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa 
Quality education and education innovation are key drivers reflected in the strategic plan of the University of Pretoria, South Africa (University of Pretoria, 2002). Following this thrust, the Department of Telematic Learning and Education Innovation (TLEI) takes the lead, facilitates and actively participates in actions aimed at education innovation, with a focus on establishing active and flexible learning environments in order to address the educational needs of lecturers and students (TLEI, 2004). The term ‘telematic’ is interpreted as flexible learning, enhanced by technology. Information and communication technology plays an important role in the creation of flexible learning environments, offering new opportunities to optimise interaction and contact between lecturers and students, as well as between students. The majority of the academic programmes offered at the University of Pretoria involve a large component of contact, face-to-face sessions in which ICT plays a supportive role. Within TLEI, groups of professional practitioners support education innovation and eLearning at the University: Education Consultants are committed to the development of a culture of teaching and learning excellence. They train and consult on various aspects of higher education practice. The e-Education team consists of project managers, instructional designers, graphic artists, video specialists, photographers and educational technology specialists. The detailed description of the strategic plan and the TLEI activities at the University of Pretoria can be found in the article, which Jill Fresen, Dolf Steyn and Alta Marx have published in the new eCompetence book. The title can be downloaded at our website: http://www.ecompetence.info/uploads/media/ch9.pdf.FOR MORE INFO CONTACT |
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