MULTILINGUAL TRAINING COURSES ON e -BUSINESS for SMEs in the South Eastern European countries through e-learning

20 million small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of the European economy. They represent 99% of all enterprises in the EU and provide around 65 million jobs. They create wealth, foster new ideas and are a key source of new jobs. By using ICT and particularly e-business, SMEs have greater opportunities to develop: they are able to buy and sell over the Internet, reduce their costs and boost productivity, and manage change more effectively. e-business helps eliminate the barrier of distance, allowing SMEs to trade worldwide from a single website.

Especially in the South Eastern European countries, the competitiveness of SMEs heavily depends on the productive usage of ICT and the development of related human skills. In many SE European countries, the level of ICT penetration in SMEs is very low. This has an effect on their capacity to collaborate on an international level, and thus on the competitiveness of the local economies.

The project ELISA (e-learning for improving access to Information Society for SMEs in the SEE Area) is an INTERREG IIIB CADSES funded project that aims at improving the access to knowledge and the information society of SMEs in South-East Europe . This overall objective will be achieved among other with the use of multilingual training material for improving ICT skills within SMEs through a multilingual, highly-interactive and easy-to-use eLearning-platform for the needs of SMEs