13th European Conference on eGovernment – ECEG 2013 1 | Page 671

Design of the Electronic Course on e‐Government Interoperability Essentials
Alla Anohina‐Naumeca 1, Vjaceslavs Sitikovs 1, Piotr Goetzen 2 and Michal Chmielecki 2 1 Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia
2 Spoleczna Akademia Nauk, Lodz, Poland
alla. anohina‐naumeca @ rtu. lv vss @ latnet. lv piotr. goetzen @ gmail. com mjchmielecki @ gmail. com
Abstract: Efficient and effective delivery of cross‐border and cross‐sectoral e‐Government public services is crucially dependent on interoperability, provision of which directly contributes to the achievement of the goals of the Digital Agenda for Europe in particular and the Europe 2020 Strategy in general. In this context, main issues, knowledge units, best practice, and legal base of interoperability must be done fully understandable for all( staff of local, regional, and national public administrations, national institutions and agencies, managers of e‐Government projects, public service developers, policy makers, etc.) who are involved in defining, designing, and implementing Europe‐wide public services. However, at the moment there are no known learning courses on interoperability in the EU member countries. The LLP Leonardo da Vinci project“ ELGI ‐ e‐learning for e‐Government” addresses this issue and aims at the development of an innovative e‐learning course for acquiring knowledge concerning interoperability. The e‐course is intended to be useful for three main target groups: decision makers responsible for the process of legislating in the field of e‐Government, public administration staff who are / will be users of public services, and contractors or, in other words, organizations involved in development and delivery of public services. The current paper presents work‐in‐progress related to the design of the mentioned e‐course. It covers all main aspects of the design starting from steps that were undertaken to create an information base needed for production of the e‐course content and finishing with the detailed specification of the e‐ course structure. Therefore, the paper specifies the information base of the e‐course, course aims, target groups, organization of learning process, modules, and topics. Moreover, each topic is presented in terms of its content and learning outcomes. The e‐course will allow target groups to acquire all the actual knowledge on interoperability in one place.
Keywords: interoperability, e‐government, e‐course
1. Introduction
The importance of interoperable public services( PSs) has been acknowledged as an essential component of EU Commission ' s efforts to contribute to improvement of the Single Market and making Europe an attractive place to live, work, and invest. Regardless that the Member States are responsible for interoperability of their own systems, interoperability at European level is needed in order to implement common EU policies. Currently, there is a huge number of ongoing efforts in establishing of interoperability, but at the same time no learning courses exist for acquiring corresponding knowledge by target groups directly or indirectly involved in development of e‐Government. The project“ ELGI‐ e‐learning for e‐Government”( 2011‐2013) aims at producing an e‐ course for delivering knowledge concerning interoperability. The paper presents work‐inprogress related to the design of the mentioned course. The methodology undertaken includes the following steps: 1) conducting the state‐of‐the‐art research at EU and national level with aim to create an information base needed for production of the e‐course content; 2) creating the curriculum, and 3) producing learning objects. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes steps related to creation of the information base of the e‐course. Section 3 pays attention to the course aims, target groups, and learning method. Section 4 presents the detailed curriculum. Conclusion and directions of future work are discussed in Section 5.
2. Creating the information base
In order to identify information sources needed for creation of the e‐course content, the following activities were carried out simultaneously:
• Research on EU policy and practices:
1. Identification of initial information sources by studying materials available at http:// europa. eu; 2. Analysis of the information sources and fixing references to additional sources; 3. Searching of additional sources;
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