BRT_Conclusions

The Hungarian participation in European Community programmes is rather insignificant despite the  25-26 community programmes which are open to Hungarian proposals. There are 79 projects in FP5 IST programme, in which Hungarian companies or institutions are contracted.  With the upcoming enlargement, more and more community programmes will welcome Hungarian proposals and co-operation: the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the eContent programme is the latest development. One important priority of community programmes is the support of small and medium sized companies. Contrary to this priority, two state institutions are the most successful bidders in proposals among the FP5 IST programme's 79 Hungarian contractors:  the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Budapest Technical and Economic University. Hungarian SMEs have neither enough intellectual capacity nor enough financial resources to have success in tendering EU's largescale programmes. A further weakness of Hungarian applicants is that they do not devote proper energy for investigating in trends and ideas coming from Brussels and in presenting the idea of their proposal to their future evaluators and the wider professional audience on international forums. Consequently, they have many difficulties in finding the proper partners, the proper consortium members. There are two projects among FP5 IST programme's 79 projects with Hungarian participation in which eLearning is the topic: CELEBRATE (Context eLearning with Broadband technologies) and SCALE (Internet-based intelligent tool to Support Collaborative Argumentation-based LEarning in secondary schools). The "supply" side of the BRT was represented by these two projects and also by MEDIA-ISF (Media-Information Sans Frontieres), which was funded in KA2. It became clear in the BRT that these R&D projects are unknown even in domestic creative workshops, which have a good tradition and great experience in eLearning multimedia developments. Practical application has not started yet though developments are partly available free for anyone interested. Practical application is impeded by the opinion that when demonstration projects come to the end, developments will be owned by those who created them and the aim is not to create something final, rather to teach actors of public education for courseware development and to teach methods of using them. Taking the former conclusions in mind there is a clear need in the future for the stronger presence of marketing aspects in all projects in order to make promotion more efficient and to disseminate developments as wide as possible. More intense promotion and immediate dissemination of developments should prevent parallel developments. Several speakers for the "demand" side emphasized this requirement. Newly launched eLearning projects should be implemented in teacher trainings at once. The definiton of eLearning is wider than digital eLearning multimedia development. Representatives forhe "demand" side clearly expressedtheir expectations. The school-system should allow the possibility of more individual training. The eLearning materials should be flexible. Government strategies on eLearning should take international standards into consideration. The aim of teacher training should be to deliver a "creative" teacher. Students should be motivated for independent learning. A rich supply of digital eLearning materials, which can be re-purposed and re-authored, is needed. Technology should be easily, evidently applicable. Access should be wide, offering equal chance for all.