When opening the World Forum of Unesco Chairs on the 13th November, 2002, Mr Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of Unesco, emphasized the need to make educational materials freely available on the web and the real possibilities to do so. As a result, the Open Educational Resources initiative has been launched as a cooperation mechanism for open, non-commercial use of educational resources (Matsuura 2002).

However, the successful implementation of these new learning possibilities requires new literacies and e-learning competencies which are central challenges both world-wide and regionally. In the global level Unesco´s Education Sector gets ready to co-ordinate the UN Literacy Decade from 2003 tp 2012 with the goal to demonstrate by 2012 that there are more literate people in the world than if we had continued with business as usual (Education Today, No 2, 2002).

In Europe the goal of achieving an e-Europe and social justice and avoiding our own digital divide demand that the challenge be met by working to ensure that all sectors of the European society are able to benefit from the employment, educational and development opportunities offered by ICT (Prometeus Newsletter, No 16, March 2002).

Many definitions of literacy exist. They relate, at their core, to an individuals’ ability to understand printed text and to communicate through print. Most contemporary definitions portray literacy in relative rather than absolute terms. They assume that there is no single level of skill or knowledge that qualifies someone as literate, but rather that there are multiple levels and kinds of literacy (e.g. numeracy, technological literacy). In order to have bearing on real-life situations, definitions of literacy must be sensitive to skills needed in out-of-school contexts, as well as to school-based competency requirements (Wagner 2001). Media literacy is multidimensional (Varis 2000). Digital Literacy is the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers (Gilster 1997).

According to the Summit of 21st Century Literacies (21st Century Literacy Summit, Berlin 2002) new approaches stress the abilities to use information and knowledge that extend beyond the traditional base of reading, writing and math.

Teachers, students, employees and citizens must now incorporate the following components to enhance their knowledge and critical thinking skills:

Technology Literacy: The ability to use new media such as the Internet to access and communicate information effectively.

Information Literacy: The ability to gather, organize and evaluate information, and to form valid opinions based on the results.

Media Creativity: The growing capacity of citizens everywhere to produce and distribute content to audiences of all sizes.

Global Literacy: Understanding the interdependence among people and nations and having the ability to interact and collaborate successfully across cultures.

Literacy with Responsibility: The competence to consider the social consequences of media from the standpoint of safety, privacy and other issues.

The Challenges of 21st Century Literacies

This new concept of literacy is presenting formidable challenges in three key areas of our lives:

Education: Despite an awareness that schools and teachers must change to help students develop the necessary skills, most educational efforts still fall short of achieving this goal.

Workplace Skills: Many businesses too, lack full understanding of the need to train their employees and the implications of failing to do so.

Civic Engagement: Though governments around the world have begun delivering their services electronically, public administrations and legislative must still find ways to make such services easier and more compelling to use. The public sector and nonprofit organizations must also help citizens use the tools of the Internet to engage in public policy and community activity.

The knowledge society will be increasingly requiring new digital literacies or e-learning competencies. The American Society for Training and Development defines that e-learning is the use of Internet and digital technologies to create experiences that educate our fellow human beings. e-Technologies do not change how human beings learn but remove constraints. e-Learning is not just Web-casting lecture, and not training materials dumped online (Horton 2001).

The European eLearning Action Plan 2001 defines e-learning as the use of new multimedia technologies and the Internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchanges and collaboration.

This requires new e-learning competencies and literacies. The first competence is simply problem definition which defines what kind of information is needed, from where, and how to process with the information towards knowledge and its presentation and management.

When approaching e-learning competencies a basic question is: what knowledge and skills will enable people to do human resource development work? (Learningcircuits 2001). The long list of required competencies can be categorized into general competencies management competencies,distribution method competencies, and presentation method competencies.

How Should a Competent e-Learning Team Be?

William Horton has elaborated a detailed example of a competent e-learning team (Horton 2001). A team for producing quality e-learning material would consist of something like 16 members. First, one person is needed for managing the whole project. Secondly, three members are needed for designing the course, including a lead designer, module designers, and subject matter experts. Thirdly, six members are needed for building the content. They would include course integrator, writers, graphics specialists, multimedia developers, html/xml coders, and programmers.

Fourthly, three members are needed to provide the technical infrastructure. These people are network/service administrators, server/database programmers, and technical support specialists. And fifthly, three members are needed for conducting e-learning. They are an administrator (curriculum), course facilitator, and online instructor.

The Prometeus conference in Paris, September 2002, discussed, among other things, the learning models and digital competence. The session tried to give answers to questions like: What are the approaches to learning in the virtual environment and how to combine traditional and new ways of life-long learning? How do different solutions like self-directed or facilitated web-based learning, virtual classrooms and discussion formats, etc. perform in practice? What is the present stage of development of experiential and interactive learning models?

The e-WSOY case from Finland by Mr Mikko Laine, Senior Vice-President and representative of the e-industry group, gave an impression on how new ways of presenting knowledge could enhance the learning experience offered by schools. In the publishing model of e-learning the producer or the designer is the teacher. A catalyst model stresses the two-way exchange in creating knowledge. The small business case “University for Industry”, presented by Professor Sam Allwinkle, Napier University, UK, covered the rollout of an educational project from planning and marketing to the operative stage and finally to the measurement of results. The paper on the new Alexandrina Virtual Library by Jaques Vauthier concentrated on the educational aspects of this project demonstrating rich opportunities for experiential and interactive learning in the field of lifelong learning.

My own approach in this Prometeus conference 2002 gave priority to a new renaissance education emphasizing the new learning culture which is rather learner than teacher centered and combines technology with the humanities, art and even religion. The new learning models and styles includes discovery and investigative learning, problem- and community-based learning, etc, when the management of yourself becomes central. The new technology and e-learning become additional tools to face-to-face traiditons and new, blended approaches can be developed to improve the quality and content of learning. Several recommendations emerge including, for example, one that when designing e-learning programmes we should begin with knowing how people learn with their own history in general both in the formal and open environments, workplaces, with the media and in real life situations.