E-Learning as a tool for the Universalisation of the University

Information and Communication Technologies offer huge potential for moving towards the implementation of the concept of Universalisation of the University. Firstly, ICT provides solutions for virtual mobility, which means giving new opportunities to people who otherwise could not enrol on traditional university courses. Another opportunity offered by ICT for the Universalisation of the University, is that it gives students fram ali over the world the chance to access open repositories of contents available on the Net. Similar considerations can be made about the availability of university professors world wide. This implies that new models of Universal Universities, with both students and teachers geographically distributed, can be activated through ICT. The aim of this paper is to describe strategies that could be adopted in order to achieve the "Universalisation of university" goal. In particular, we discuss the potenti al and problems of using ICT for this purpose. The ideas reported are the result of a research activity we have carried out in Italy concerning the e-Iearning market at University and the obstacles to the growth of this market according to a survey involving students of the last year of high school.