The Distance Education and Lifelong Learning initiative has as its mission to promote educational change and new forms of online learning by way of integrating interactive services, collaborative environments, multimedia content and synchronous communication within a framework of learner-centered pedagogy, made possible by broadband communications channels.

  As outlined in the Nordunet2 proposal, the Nordunet2 programme adresses four key areas, among which

the first three charters [Distance Education and Lifelong Learning, Tele Medicine, Digital Libraries] focus on new applications and new ways of using advanced and high speed networks to obtain more quality, more efficiency and new ways of working.

R&D related to use and practical applications are emphasized in all the initiatives, rather than to the underlying high-bandwidth network technology as such. Given this framework, according to the proposal the goal of the Distance Education and Lifelong Learning initiative, specifically, is

to establish an advanced infrastructure for collaboration and distributed education across the Nordic countries. The projects should be "show rooms" for the use of advanced infrastructure in an educational setting, showing other universities and the industry how new technology can be used in an innovative way. The advanced infrastructure will challenge the underlying network infrastructure and give directions to where this research should go.

The domain of lifelong learning includes all levels of public school, academic and continuous education, and corporate training. Networked 'distance education' is in the present context understood in its broad sense as synonymous to online 'distributed learning environments'. Online distributed learning environments provide solutions, resources, and functionality which facilitate and support learning processes in which participants and learning resources are distributed in space and/or time.

The Distance Education and Lifelong Learning initiative invites interested parties to apply for project funding, see Call for Proposals under the Nordunet2 programme. Priority will be given to applications which, within a Nordic perspective, relate to one or several of the following properties of distributed learning environments:

• innovative pedagogy: collaborative learning; learner-centered and constructivistic approaches; groupwork, teamwork, and project support; problem-based and project-oriented learning
• synchronous (real-time) communication
• multimedia communication and learning resources
• sophisticated forms of interactivity
• non-proprietary, standardized client software; adherance to standards as to file, metadata, and communication formats

The Distance Education and Lifelong Learning initiative has obvious affinities with the other Nordunet2 initiatives. Particularly closely related is the Digital Libraries initiative, which adresses issues concerning architectures for publishing, management, and access, relevant to the use of educational content objects and services in learning environments. Hence interested parties may apply for project funding from more than one of the NORDUnet2 initiatives.