A Technology Enhanced Flexible Learning Approach for SMEs

The European project ELISA (e-learning for improving access to information society for SMEs in the South East European Area) is an INTERREG CADSES project that involves 13 partners from 8 countries, coming from academia, government and the service sector, with the main objective of implementing combined training methods for improving the acceleration of e-business penetration in the target countries. In this paper we give a brief description of ELISA, we summarize the implementation of various technology enhanced training deliveries and we analyse the characteristics and functionality of the ELISA e-learning platform that was created based on the open-source learning management system (LMS) Moodle. We are trying to prove that, regardless the difficulties, technology enhanced learning can be efficiently used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and by governments who wish to create learning centres providing such training to local SMEs with reduced cost. Given that the 23 million SMEs represent the 99% of the European enterprises, this can prove to be a very efficient contribution to the Lisbon European strategy for the information society.