Direction

EADTU is a membership organisation. Each member appoints a General Board member, to represent the institution within the Association. Every two years, the Board elects a President as well as a Secretary-General. The Executive Committee is also formed by election. It consists of the President, Secretary-General and a delegation of the General Board members.

We are pleased to announce that from 1 January 2010 Carlos Reis (Rector Universidade Aberta) will be president of EADTU. We thank David Vincent (Pro-Vice Chancellor the Open University UK ) for his support and commitment as our President in the last four years.

Welcome to the EADTU,

As president of EADTU, I fully endorse our fundamental aim: “to promote the progress of open and distance education and e-learning and its position in Europe and in the world, through active support to the institutional development of its members and to the European co-operation between them in strategic areas”. Furthermore, it is important to recall the major objectives of EADTU: to increase the number of its members, in accordance with EU expansion and the consolidation of the Bologna community; to strengthen cooperation by promoting the cause of borderless education across Europe; to promote distance higher education, as well as lifelong open and flexible learning.

EADTU must continue to play a central role in keeping up with the world trends in the further development of distance education, as well as in the creation of the European Higher Education Area. In order to do so, we count on initiatives and projects in different fields:

• cooperation with the European Commission, mainly with DG Education and Training and with DG Information Society;
• cooperation with partners in the universe of distance higher education;
• partnerships with higher education organisations and institutions, and political and economic agents, thus demonstrating the relevance of lifelong learning;
• innovation in distance education, understood as a process of constant development;
• open educational resources (OER) programmes, according to the best international practices, some of them developed by EADTU members;
• quality assurance, faced as a strategic issue for the further development of distance education.

In addition to what was previously mentioned (and which does not exhaust the challenges that distance higher education faces) I wish to underline that the strengthening of EADTU depends highly on the active involvement of its members. All contributions they might make, in the academic, doctrinal, pedagogical, technological, and education policy fields, are decisive for our joint work.

Carlos Reis, President