Adaptation of courses for trans-European tele-learning

This paper addresses the problems of adapting instructional courses for trans-European tele-learning and for enlarging the range of students and learning modalities in distance learning. Building on previous work on the portability of educational software, the paper examines various dimensions of adaptation of existing courses: (a) content, (b) instructional materials, (c) language issues, (d) instructional delivery, (e) the instructional setting of the course, and (f) the situation of the course in a programme of study, and considers how those dimensions will particularly affect course adaptation. From this analysis, a set of six guidelines is presented for course adaptation. The Commission of the European Community recently supported a trans-European project, TeleScopia, which aimed at investigating these dimensions as research issues.