EDEN Network of Academics and Professionals (NAP)

1. The Minutes of the 14th Annual General Meeting, held 23 June 2005 in Helsinki, Finland has been mailed to each contact person of our institutional members and the individual members. In case, you are a NAP nominee you can ask the document from your institutional contact person, however you will also find it at the password protected NAP members' area on the homepage. If you would need assistance for the password, please ask the EDEN Secretariat.

2. We are pleased to announce that the Proceedings of the Fifth Open Classroom Conference held in Poitiers, France "Teachers' Professional Development, addressing eLearning, Innovation and Quality in Schooling" are now accessible in electronic format for members of EDEN. If you would like to receive information about how to access the papers, please send a message from your e-mail address as it is registered on the eden-members mailing list, with the subject: 'Proceedings download request' to the EDEN Secretariat addressed to cser@eden-online.org

3. The EDEN President and Secretary General visited Anadolu University in Eskisehir, Turkey on 16-18 November, upon invitation of the University. They had meetings with Rector Engin Atac, Dean of the Open Education Faculty, Nazmi Ulutak and Vice-Deans Mehmet Kesim and Murat Barkan. The impressing institution, approaching 1 million students, is one of the world's largest open and distance learning universities. There has been a strong interest for developing the collaboration with EDEN and a number of promising concrete steps for the near future have been identified.

4. The EDEN Executive Committee at their meeting on 24-25 October in Vienna, had profound discussion about conceptual issues with a view to the future strategy of the Association. The content of the 2006 Annual Conference to take place 14-17 June in Vienna, was also discussed and finalised. The First Announcement and Call for Papers has been mailed to you and is available on the EDEN website.

5. Let us draw your attention to the international conference on eLearning titled "Developing a Common Platform for Global Co-operation", 13-14 February 2006 organised by an EDEN Member institution, Universita Telematica Guglielmo Marconi. Detailed information is available at: http://www.unimarconi.it/conference06/

6. Andras Szucs, Secretary General of EDEN, upon the invitation of the organisers, gave a key presentation about "ICTs and e-Learning at Universities - Beyond Slogans" in the e-learning track of the IFIP - International Federation for Information Processing conference titled "I3E: e-Commerce, e-Business, e-Government", held 26-28 October in Poznan, Poland.

7. The MEGATREND project, in frames of the EU e-learning programme, with the participation of EDEN, had its kick-off meeting in Oslo on 4 November. The most interesting project aims to identify the MegaTrends: what are the rules for achieving critical mass in e-learning; what are the rules for moving from a small scale fragile e-learning provider to a large scale permanent and successful e-learning institution. It will analyse the trends and contributions to large-scale success and to identify recommendations for success and failure in e-learning.

8. Linked to the Online Educa Berlin 2005, EFQUEL, where EDEN is a founding member, will organise a Workshop and Conference as a first important milestone in its history. The event that aims to explore key issues in quality - from quality policies to elearning futures and from accreditation of quality to quality for social inclusion, runs over two days (29-30 November). It will consist of an EFQUEL Member Forum, with an open invitation for the afternoon session and a public Conference about Innovation for Quality in eLearning where speakers from Europe, the Americas and Asia will share their concerns, concepts and visions on how to innovate eLearning through quality. An outline programme and registration facility are available on http://www.qualityfoundation.org/news_events_2.htm