19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: e-Learning

Knowledge management and life long education in scientific matter

Anna Moreno (anna.moreno@casaccia.enea.it), Sergio Grande (sergio.grande@casaccia.enea.it)
ENEA, Italy

In Italy, nowadays the scientific knowledge belongs to Universities and research centres. The training courses for workers are, very often, related either to a very general matter such as quality, environment, etc. either to very specific matters such as the use of new machines and/or software. The Italian production is undertaken by 97% of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME).  The SME workers are hardly involved in any training, either traditional or distance learning because they cannot leave the work place and the majority of them have left the scientific studies at schools, very often more than 20 years before. These peculiarities bring to the difficulty of exploiting the research results and promote the transferring of new technologies from the research centres to SME.

In 1998 ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment, in order to overcome the difficulty of supporting competitiveness and sustainable development with the results of its research, launched an e-learning platform with the mission of sharing the scientific knowledge among any person, not only workers but also students and unemployed people.  In 6 years more than 12.000 users have followed one or more of the 30 courses on line and the number of courses will double during this year as well as the number of users. Many agreements with Schools, Universities, private and public training organisation are under way to improve the dissemination of the scientific knowledge. The purpose of these agreements is to build up an open data base of scientific learning object that anyone can use.

The e-learning object model developed in ENEA has been designed by taking into consideration the heterogeneity of the class of users.

The modularity of the courses, the possibility to certificate the results of the learning process at a University or, in the future, in the schools, meets the requirements of this class of users.

The key of the success of ENEA initiative is due to avoiding control of the time of access and avoiding a compulsory learning “path”.

The SME workers, in fact, have a heterogeneous knowledge and it is not possible to use the same learning system that has been successful for large organization where the workers/employees belong to the same community. In a knowledge based economy it is important to give “capsules of information” to anyone, anywhere and at anytime so that a self training can be build on the person needs.