AMMAN - Jordan has been selected as the venue for an international conference to promote distance and e-learning, organisers said.

Scheduled for October this year, the 4th Annual Conference of Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) 2007 is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-managed international initiative that began in 2001. It is operated by a growing team of MIT faculty, student and staff volunteers, according to LINC’s founder and director, Richard Larson.

“LINC’s premise is simple and compelling: with today’s computer and telecommunications technologies, every young person can have a quality education regardless of his or her place of birth,” he told The Jordan Times while on a visit to Amman this week.

It will be the first time the event is staged outside the US.

“Our friends and colleagues from Jordan and Dubai, professionals who have been active participants in LINC since its beginning five years ago, invited us here.

“The conference was also invited to Mexico and to Ireland, but we selected Jordan, a country that values highly quality education for its people and has launched major initiatives in education,” Larson said.

LINC is a consortium of educators from around the world who are interested in using distance and e-learning technologies to help their respective countries increase access to quality university education for a larger percentage of the population, Larson told The Jordan Times.

The conference will take place on the shores of the Dead Sea October 28-30, according to Chairman of Amman Committee on Local Arrangements for LINC 2007 and Director of Learning Arabia Saeed Jahama.

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The conference will focus this year on “Technology-enabled education: A catalyst for positive change”, according to Jahama.

It will discuss the policies and programmes that support the implementation of ICT, education reform and economic development.

According to Larson, Jordan can benefit from this conference by sharing best practices in e-learning, as found throughout the world.

“Jordan should be able to learn from others and avoid mistakes that other pioneers in e-learning have discovered and have learned from,” he said.

Dubai will also host the executive session of the conference October 31-November 1.

Jordan presents itself as a regional pioneer of educational reform.

In 2003, it proposed the Jordan Education Initiative (JEI) at the Dead Sea World Economic Forum.

The JEI is a public-private partnership and a mechanism for enabling and accelerating social and economic development across the region through quality education.It is designed to improve education through the effective use of ICT.