The Role of Key-Stakeholders and Collaborators in the Long-Term Sustainability of an e-Learning Portal: The Case of Open Discovery Space Portal

Abstract

E-Learning resources, learning technologies and applications are becoming more and more popular in Europe, attracting the interest of the European Union and individual governments. E-Learning portals can be proved to be a “deus ex machina” solution in the global budget reduction for education. Stakeholders have a direct influence on factors that stimulate sustainable development and growth of technology and infrastructures and can greatly affect the sustainability of a project and its outcomes. The ODS project aims to create a pan-European E-Learning portal (multilingual open innovation platform) which acknowledges that engagement of stakeholders and their collaborative interaction with content, technology, software, webinar management service providers and e-publishers is very important for the success and long- term sustainability of the project. Thus, drawing on first-hand experiences from own research, as well as on previous knowledge, a new “stakeholder and collaborator analysis framework” and “engagement strategy” is proposed and developed for this purpose.