E-learning in the Academic Context: Toward a New Economy of Education

Nowadays, information and communication technologies are incorporating extremely rapidly to the individual’s education and training. This trend lead the European academic research to focus on key terms like open distance learning or lifelong learning. In this context, there are a large number of past and actual projects and researches concerning the content, methodologies, technologies and new pedagogical challenges – all parts of so-called elearning environments. There are a lot of achievements from this work but there is still a significant work left for the process of building a reliable and efficient learning process capable of satisfying the end user needs and meet the necessary requirements imposed by the educational organizations (content, standardization, measurement tools, ratings, etc.). This article reveals the components of an e-learning environment, the present trends in this research field and some conclusions.