The overall goal of UNITE is to contribute to the improvement of Europe-wide education in secondary schools based on common, innovative principles in technology, in pedagogy, and in learning scenarios, tested by a well-defined validation framework.

Today's situation in eLearning is characterized by proprietary solutions. Platforms, content and underlying pedagogical models are focusing on specific application scenarios. This situation makes the re-use of content material, the exchange of best practices, and the improvement of pedagogic models very difficult. Moreover, profound validation methods as well as a proper socio-economic analysis of the context of eLearning are often missing.In this situation, UNITE aims at tackling these problems on a European scale.

The underlying technical basis of UNITE is a state of the art platform. This platform combines communication and collaboration features in a portal-like environment, a state of the art eLearning management system, providing an eLearning content repository and a best practices “eKnowledge” base with features for mobile learning. The second underlying concept of UNITE is the development of a pedagogical framework focusing on mobile learning, exploratory learning and group learning.

On top of the basic platform and the pedagogy, innovative eLearning scenarios will be designed and dev eloped. These scenarios will cover learning in distributed environments (in school, in computer labs and in nature), the communication and collaboration between learners and teachers as well as the building and usage of best practices, and the authoring and re-use of content in a Europe-wide knowledge base and repository. The UNITE system will then be used in a Europe-wide field test: 14 secondary schools in 10 countries will execute variants of the different eLearning scenarios and test especially the country-specific aspects of the UNITE approach. The UNITE project with its innovative concepts and wide field test needs a very careful validation. Therefore, the development of a validation methodology for the quality management of the whole eLearning production chain and the execution of the different tests as well as the integration of the results is an essential work package in UNITE. In parallel and in close collaboration with the validation, an intensive socio-economic evaluation will be undertaken.