FELLOWS (Facilitating and Enhancing access to Life-long Learning sOlutions for a Wide variety of Social categories) aims to develop an online distance learning platform for disadvantaged users in training institutions in four European countries (UK, F, A, D).

The project is based around an existing software platform that can be used for developing and delivering courses which will be developed further so that it meets the specific needs of the target groups.

The target groups include adult learners, such as women at home who are wishing to return to work, and younger people, such as unemployed youths who are wishing to enter the job market but who do not have the necessary skills. The groups share in common the possibility of being poorly educated and having low IT skills. Both groups also experience difficulties in reaching traditional training through having to travel long distances or having no transportation available. In addition, some of the younger people have special difficulties that may be attributable to behavioural or learning difficulties, to language problems or low levels of literacy.

It could be argued that these groups have been excluded from the ‘IT revolution’, partly because they are viewed as commercially unattractive. However, it has been estimated that more than 35 million people fall into these categories in the four countries that have been targeted, and therefore they are a substantial group worthy of the ‘e-inclusion’ initiative. The FELLOWS project recognises that the question of how to ‘e-include’ such groups is not a trivial one.

One way of approaching this problem is to ask the question differently: What would we have to do to design e-learning methods that EXCLUDE these social categories? On the technical side, we would have to ensure that the training is delivered via an expensive and relatively complicated technology that many cannot afford or understand how to use. On the pedagogical side, we should provide fairly standard, traditional courses that appeal only to motivated, career-oriented and relatively well-educated people. We should also ignore the different characteristics of the different groups of learners. For instance, we know from other research that adult learners tend to be aware of their own needs and will enter into training with specific goals. They also have other responsibilities and will require some social support to continue with their learning. On the other hand, younger learners tend to be less sure of their expectations and require more structure in their training in order to keep them motivated. So, it seems that excluding people from e-learning is quite easy; in fact it already seems to have been done!

What should we be doing? We need to find out about our users, in detail, and make sure that we understand what experience, knowledge and expectations they have. We should attempt to remove the excluding factors, both technical and pedagogical. School of Psychology, University of Leeds Some of the solutions will be political decisions, for instance is it possible to provide free computers for people to use in their homes for e-learning? We should appreciate that the excluding factors may be different for different groups of people and therefore, it is important to ensure that another important group of people are taken account of, namely the people who will provide the training. If we are to create the correct content for e-learning courses, delivered in the most effective and appealing manner, then we must ensure that the knowledge and skills of the trainers who create the courses are used and developed. It is also true that we cannot expect to solve these kinds of problems without adequate investment to support the activities of those developing the new materials.

To conclude: a word of warning. A report for the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK stated that 80-90% of new technology implementations fail to meet their stated objectives. Two of the reasons cited for such failure are that most investments in IT are technology led, and secondly that most organisations give inadequate attention to the important human and organisational factors. Thus, in order for e-inclusion to succeed we must pay attention not to what we can do, but to what we need to do for the people that we are targeting.