| |JANUARY - FEBRUARY 20268EUROPEEUROPEIN MY OPINION By Liisi Jarve, Head of Educational Technology Centre, Tallinn University of TechnologyIMPROVING THE QUALITY OF E-SUPPORTED LEARNINGEstonia has been described as one the most digitally advanced countries in the world. Soon after the restoration of independence in 1991, Tiger Leap Program was launched to support educational institutions in acquiring the necessary equipment and to provide IT training for teachers.These activities have been carried out successfully for many years by Estonian IT Foundation for Education HITSA (today HARNO) ­ a government agency created through cooperation between the state, universities and IT companies. Among other activities HARNO administrates and develops centralin formation systems, learning environments and learning resources.Years of hard work has paid off: Estonia ranks 1st in Europe and 5th in the world in the PISA 2018 results. We are no. 1 in Europe for digital learning (CEPS) and the fastest growing innovator in the EU Innovation Scoreboard 2021.Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) is the second largest and only technological university in Estonia. This year our e-courses received over 50 percent of the national e-course quality labels and the e-course of the year award issued by theEstonian Quality Agency for Higher and Vocational Education (EKKA).E-Support Evaluation ProgrameE-Learning reform at TalTech began in 2017 with the creation of a document called the E-Learning Standard. In parallel we launched our first project to support the implementation of this standard ­ the E-Support Evaluation Programme. The aim of the project was to bring all compulsory courses of the university to the basic quality level by 2020. During 3 years 1200 courses were reviewed and evaluated by our instructional designers. The project ended with 91 percent of compulsory courses confirmed to the basic level.In the early months of the project, we were heavily criticized by professors, but during the pandemic and shift to distance learning, everyone finally saw the positive influence of the project. We started distance learning with well prepared lecturers and already existing e-courses. When it comes to the choice of an LMS, thenroughly 99 percent of courses are located in our university's Moodle environment TalTech Moodle that we transferred to in 2019 from the central HARNO Moodle provided by the government. Harno Moodle currently hosts 38 universities and vocational schools, 265 general education schools and 42 other institutions. The services provided to us by HARNO were excellent, we simply outgrew from the central platform. Moving to our own platform gave us the opportunity to better manage developments related to the platform, brand our Moodle and to start integration projects with other systems of our university with the help of our university's IT team. Liisi Jarve
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