HOW COMMITTED IS YOUR COUNTRY TO DISTANCE LEARNING EDUCATION? - THE COMMITMENT TO DISTANCE LEARNING HIGHER EDUCATION MODEL (CDLHEM)

Cross Border Education (CBE) and especially Distance Learning Education (DLE) mainly delivered through e-learning, is becoming a strategic direction of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) reforms. Its importance is recently gaining more and more recognition by both the policy makers as well as the various providers of Higher Education. The vision and mission of Universities recently change to address CBE and DLE and associated new modes of teaching and learning, utilizing Information Communication Technologies. This paper introduces CDLHEM, the Commitment to Distance Learning Higher Education Model. CDLHEM is thus a model, which measures the commitment of institutions of Higher Education with regards DLE. The model is based on the Report of the European Commission (EC) "New modes of learning and teaching in higher education". Based on the various recommendations, addressed in the report, we have defined a number of quality indicators and propose herein, a model based on a numeric system for measuring the adherence to these recommendations/indicators by a particular EU member state and its institutions, thus measuring the state's commitment to DLE. We are also in the process of building a web-based tool, namely CDLHEMTool that will provide an on-line version of CDLHEM; the tool will allow a member state to carry out a self-assessment of its commitment to DLE and hence identify areas of improvement.