Digital Learning Resources

The Ministry of Education has not engaged specifically in software development, but has invested heavily in providing a 'program matrix' which presents an overview of commercial software linked to curriculum attainment targets and a central database of secondary school software.

Digital Learning Resources are developed through a Government policy on the development of educational software. The first stage hands over responsibility to educational publishers to develop materials that 'flesh out' the curricula. At a second stage, the Government may take action to develop resources in areas where there is a lack of content (e.g. in recent years this has included special needs education). The policy also encourages teachers, other artistic and heritage organisations, commercial and open-source developers to contribute to the production of high quality educational resources.

One of the key projects in recent years has been the development of an educational portal which acts as a central point for educational information and support in the use of ICT. It includes examples of good practice and is organised thematically. The portal allows individual teachers, alongside other publishers, to share their own digital resources. The portal can be found at klascement.net. This year, new portals have been developed including, knooppunt.be and bingel.be.

Smartschool is the most widely used VLE. It is a local, commercial tool. Some Catholic schools make use of EloV. Open source products such as Moodle are used less frequently.