While the universities are moving from a traditional profile to a new one, covering all the areas of Lifelong Learning (from school teachers’ education, to adult education and training, maintaining of course their “traditional” students), the capability to fit the different visions of these sub-systems in the use of ICT in teaching and learning, and so to provide a quality-driven offer, is limited. It is detected that the lack of synergies between these sub-systems represents a main constraint toward the quality enhancement in the HEI. The need identified is to promote sharing and understanding between different paradigms expressed by the different roles played by HEI into the LLL policy, by involving directly the decision makers of the innovation processes in a common strategy toward the enhancement of the quality assurance aspects and to the strategic integration of ICT in teaching and learning.

The HEXTLEARN network, of which ESU has joined as a member, aims at increasing the level of attention of the Higher Education Community on ICT strategic integration, by generating awareness, commitment and networking on quality assurance aspects and strategic integration of ICT in teaching, learning and innovative in Higher Education; promoting mutual understanding and common purposes toward quality assurance and common innovation strategies among the groups active in ICT teaching and training in HEI and addressing the different LLL subsystems; disseminating replicable solutions to help set up communities at EU Level establishing a community of decision makers in the context of a LLL strategy and to support the modernisation agenda for European organisations of Higher Education from a community of expert peer reviewers able to serve the quality development of ICT use for teaching and learning in HEI. The core target group addressed thus will be Higher Education policy makers, those who are involved in decision making at all levels in Higher Education (governance of institutions, associations, evaluation agencies, etc.), reviewers, practitioners in the field of innovation. To reach the proposed objectives, the project plans to carry out an extensive research of good practices, to analyse the straightness of the different approaches in ICT/eLearning processes in implementing the LLL strategy in the HEI, and to promote the transferability of the best practices identified; to carry out peer review exercises, based on collaboration between participants (decision makers) and experts of the ICT approaches and applications in the participating HEI in the transversal dimensions taken into consideration; to carry out all the activities of the established network, such as exchange of information and practices, promotion of the network to new learning communities of the HE world, to foster the communication and the interaction between transversal learning communities in the field of ICT integration of teaching and learning, organise events supporting transnational exchange and cooperation and supporting networking. All these activities will be supported by implementing the dissemination plan, which will include the exploitation of results plan, the quality and evaluation plan to ensure the quality of processes and outcomes, while the project management will ensure the achievement of project results and the accuracy of procedures.

The main outcomes of the networking action will be the peer review method implemented and exploited, and the networking itself as well, and the main outputs will be a report on “Good practices and methodologies for HEI using ICT in the different fields of LLL” and a “Living toolkit” as a web-based service continuously update and improved, to be used as a reference to identify criteria to enhance quality among the university teams which are active in the different roles of LLL. The short term impact envisaged is the increased awareness, commitment and networking on quality assurance aspects and strategic integration of ICT in teaching, learning and innovative in Higher Education, while the long term impact is envisaged in the network contribution to the improvement of Education system in Europe.