Bucharest, December 2^nd, 2009 – The IT based Education System (SEI) proves again it is a successful project, internationally recognized, both in terms of complexity and originality and in terms of number of beneficiaries and the impact on the educational Romanian system.

The SEI project has recently received the "Best eLearning solution" distinction, within the international competition "eLearning in Praxis", part of the 7th edition of ICETA - International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications, held in Slovakia. The award was offered by the American Chamber of Commerce in Slovakia.

The "eLearning in Praxis" competition evaluates the involvement of governments in using IT solutions for education, increasing the quality of eLearning solutions, and supporting interest in designing, implementing and disseminating new methods of education, based on eLearning.

"We are honoured of this new award which reconfirms the value of the SEI project, the most comprehensive and efficient program of introducing IT to the Romanian education. Adoption of technology in education through SEI, shows a change in people’s mentality, oriented towards a modern, knowledge based society", said Radu Jugureanu, AeL eContent Department Manager, SIVECO Romania.

SEI, the Governmental program was launched in 2001, having as strategic objective to improve the Romanian educational system and the teaching/learning process in pre-universitary education, by introducing information technology. SIVECO Romania is part of the consortium that implemented the project, providing an integrated eLearning solution to Romanian schools.

A few figures can give a comprehensive view of this impressive project: more than 15,000 IT laboratories installed in all schools in the country, nearly 5 million users, 192,000 computers deployed with latest technology, over 140,000 teachers trained, 3,700 multimedia AeL lessons, the distribution of over 1,800,000 candidates for the admission exam to high schools (2001-2009), displaying the results of over 1,300,000 candidates for Baccalaureate (2003-2009), over 130,000 registered users and over 2,000,000 visitors on the Romanian educational portal, www.portal.edu.ro.

Over the years SEI has received many international prizes in large-scale and prestigious competitions: "Good Practice Label" - European eGovernment Awards 2009; European IT Excellence Award 2008 in Frankfurt for the eLearning solution AeL;"Best Practices in eGovernment 2007" - Prize of the European Commission for the National Education Database, part of the SEI program; International Project Management Association Awards Gala in 2007; Krakow - SEI is considered one of the greatest achievements of project management in the world; the educational content - AEL Content - is nominated for the ICT Prizes competition organized by the European Council for Applied Sciences, Technology and Engineering (Euro-CASE) 2007 ; World Summit Award 2005, Tunis - Best eLearning Content in the World "for interactive AeL lessons ";Honorable Mention for eGovernment in 2005, Manchester; nominated by the European Commission on Euro-CASE ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Prize - the eLearning AeL solution ; the AeL platform is nominated for the IST Prize 2004, the European IT "Oscar" prize of Informatics - (prize offered by the European Commission), Brussels; "Best Practice" for eGovernment 2001, Brussels - European Commission prize for the application for high schools admission ADLIC.