Intercultural and Multilingual E-Learning to Bridge the Digital Divide

The Internet is changing the economy, the society and the culture. But an inequality in access to information exits and is creating an information digital divide. This article describes the ODISEAME project as an effort to extend the use of the Internet to several very different countries of the Euro-Mediterranean area. One of the main achievements of the project is to share and transfer technology and knowledge, with the aim of reducing the existing barriers for digital inclusion. ODISEAME is an intercultural and multilingual project, which is focused on the application of Information and Communication Technologies to the learning process in the context of University Education. The article firstly examines the barriers of digital inclusion: cost of infrastructure and lack of contents in the mother tongue. It then describes the ODISEAME project and the e-learning experiences, before discussing how the project promotes digital inclusion.