Podcasting a tool for sustainable online learning environments. Experimental analysis of the new opportunities

The keyword which describes in the most effective way Twenty-first century Higher education is suggested by Daniel et al. (2009)[1] and it is “expansion”. More and more people will invest in their own education and in this process Higher Education is on the front line. The need for education and training, though, cannot be generic, what nowadays society wants cannot be identified in static knowledge. At the end of the learning path students should be able to employ the outcomes of learning in order to generate new learning. That is why new solutions and methods must be acquired and adopted. Being those the conditions, and having at disposal the undeniable chances that the Internet offers, a possible direction to be undertaken could be the one that drives us directly to the potentialities of distance education performed in adaptive environments. The present contribution aims at analyzing Higher Education present needs, offers a general highlight of adaptive and intelligent web based education systems and concentrates on examples which better respond to the needs previously highlighted.