Netherlands Antilles

The Netherlands Antilles (Dutch: Nederlandse Antillen), previously known as the Netherlands West Indies - or Dutch Antilles or Dutch West Indies - consists of two groups of islands in the Caribbean Sea in the Lesser Antilles: Curaçao and Bonaire, just off the Venezuelan coast, and Sint Eustatius, Saba and Sint Maarten, located southeast of the Virgin Islands.

The Netherlands Antilles used to form an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. However, in 2010 the territory was split up: Curaçao and Sint Maarten became autonomous countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba became special municipalities of the Netherlands.

Thus the Netherlands now is a Caribbean country! (in part)

Despite the entity having split up, it is still sometimes convenient to group the islands together.

Details

The population is 183,000.

The capital is (and largest city) is Willemstad.

The islands' economy depends mostly upon tourism, international financial services, international commerce and shipping and petroleum.

The Netherlands Antilles was scheduled to be dissolved as a unified political entity on December 15, 2008, so that the five constituent islands would attain new constitutional statuses within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but this dissolution has been postponed to an indefinite future date. As of December 15, 2008, legislation to amend the charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and to define the new status of Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius was still being reviewed.

This in fact did not happen until October 2010 five new entities were formed with two distinct relationships to the Netherlands - for details (which are complex) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Netherlands_Antilles

e-learning

There seem to be a number of developments in ICT with the Ministry of Education.

The country has a national university, the University of Netherlands Antilles, with a web site at http://www.una.an with material in English as well as Dutch. This (in summer 2011) seems fully operational. There is a good description of its activities at http://www.una.an/en/overuna/overuna.asp - including material on its approach to quality.

UNA also runs the Blackboard e-learning system - see http://blackboard.una.an

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