eLearning at Czech Universities in 1999-2010

In 2001 the European Commission announced eLearning to be a strategic plan fro developing new trends in gradual and lifelong education. Similar to this, in the Czech Republic strong emphasis has been put on education and improving competences in the field of ICT and foreign languages since the beginning of this century. These decisions led to substantial changes in the educational concept on university level. A wide range of agreement and disagreement with new educational approaches could be seen both across the whole system and insight single institutions. Teams were established dealing with the process of eLearning implementation in the tertiary education, at the beginning being very informal, joining enthusiasts, and their activities were hardly supported. Pioneering eLearning activities in this period were usually financed from various, mostly European projects. Despite the starting troubles the awareness of possibilities provided by eLearning was spreading slowly but steadily. Nowadays there exist university departments specialized in eLearning and its implementation into the process of instruction. There was also established a system for funding eLearning activities so it does not depend on random effort of single employees any more. These trends have step by step resulted in both quantitative increase in ICT implementation and related activities in tertiary education, and in substantial shift in quality of formal and informal view on eLearning. Despite the starting problems in the last decade, eLearning has become a standard in tertiary education. The eLearning forms of instruction at universities can be used in both gradual study programmes and lifelong education. eLearning can be applied in the distance study programmes, in the combined (part-time) form of instruction or supporting present lessons (blended learning). In 2009 a research "Evaluation of the modern technologies contributing towards forming and development university students' competences" focusing on eLearning implementation at Czech universities started, being supported by the Czech Science Foundation. There are 26 public universities accredited in the Czech Republic. Annual reports of these universities were the main source of information for this research.