The development of the ISOTIS Virtual Learning Environment - an online platform that aims to promote the use of different languages and multiculturalism at home and (pre)school) - followed two main principles:

1. Openness: the learning environment is based on Open Source software, in order to make it possible to reuse existing resources, to enable the release of final products to a larger community of users, and to grant full control to the developers on the various parts of the system, as well as on data management;

2. Accessibility: the platform should be inclusive, following the principles of Universal Design (Mace, 1985) and, more specifically, the guidelines of the Universal Design for Learning framework (Rose & Meyer, 2002). This requirement was dictated by the super-diversity of participants, whose age, education and socioeconomic status greatly varied from country to country.

This topic is described in the article Design for inclusion in a linguistically and culturally diverse Europe: Challenges in the development of a Virtual Learning Environment, authored by ISOTIS researchers Andrea Mangiatordi, Giulia Pastori, Valentina Pagani, Alice Sarcinelli, and Leonardo Menegola (University of Milano-Bicocca). The article is published in the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies.

Click here to find the article.