Chapter 9: E-Learning in the Portuguese Educational Context

The Bologna Process, a European educational reform process initiated in 1999 by 29 European countries, has strongly influenced recent changes to the basic laws of the Portuguese education system. The Bologna Process recognizes knowledge as a universal good, seeks to harmonize higher education, highlights the need to make education more attractive to society at large, and recognizes the need to adapt the process of teaching and learning to today’s societal and technological realities. And because distance education promotes lifelong learning, mobility, and a European dimension of education, distance learning has been legally and formally selected as one of the modes of education under the Bologna Process. Indeed, e-learning has now been given a greater range of application than ever before: no longer limited to higher and continuing education, e-learning now assumes an important current role in both primary and secondary education efforts (European Commission, 2001).