PREMISES TO IMPLEMENT E-LEARNING FOR IN-SERVICE PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND SPORTS TEACHERS 1 Monica STANESCU, Marius STOICESCU, Roxana BEJAN, Ana Maria VASILIU National University of Physical Education And Sports, 140, Constantin Noica street, Bucharest, Romania monica_iulia@yahoo.com, marius_stoicescu@yahoo.com, rbejan@yahoo.com, ana_vasiliu85@yahoo.com Abstract: Nowadays, lifelong learning is one of the main priorities in adults’ education. Relying on the physical education and sports field specificity, this paper aims at approaching the possibility to insert the e-learning system into a curriculum designed to improve the in-service teachers’ professional standards. To fulfill this aim, we analyzed the initial and continuing education curricula, namely the bachelor, master and doctoral degrees, as well as the educational programs issued within an institutional project co-financed from the European Funds. We shall synthesize our previous research in this field and we shall emphasize our e-learning institutional experience acquired due to the Comenius project we were involved in. Thus, we identified some premises that could influence the e-learning application to in- service teachers’ continuing education in our specialty domain (ICT use skill level, people’s and institutional attitudes toward ICT, curriculum design). By considering the e-learning system as an opportunity for our institution to develop its own educational system, this research synthesizes the knowledge our future project will rely on. Key-words: e-learning, physical education and sports, in-service teachers. I. INTRODUCTION Physical education and sports represent nowadays a very interesting area characterized by interdisciplinarity. To develop this study field, we must accept the support provided by different related sciences: human and social sciences, biomechanics, mathematics, management and so on. A really significant contribution is brought by informatics, which has lately discovered in physical education and sports a huge application area [1], [2]. Although ICT is more and more applied to the educational sphere, the most important problem of our modern society is digital education and education through ICT means, this representing a first step to accomplish such an education type [3]. Thus, the focus must be placed on teachers’ training level that can be improved by using specialized ICT training programs [4]. Under these conditions, we can identify at least two challenges the specialists in our field must cope with. We have to build up the competences required by modern technology, both to the education benefit and for an assisted sports training process [5], [6], [7]. We must add that the continuing education process based on the e-learning system provides the learners more and more frequent opportunities to acquire new competences [8]. Problems that can be solved by means of the e-learning education are already well known:  Physical distance (rural dwelling, out of campus students, teachers from different geographical areas) - space barriers are removed. 1 Research conducted within the project Professionalization of the teaching career in physical education and sports from the continuing education perspective (ID 13096), co-financed by FSE through POSDRU 2007-2013.