 Good morning everyone. We are going to start the second day of this conference of even annual conference here in Bruges. I'm sure you are enjoying the conference and also the generosity of this institution the Divis University and I'm sure you are enjoying also the wonderful city of Bruges. This morning we have two keynote speakers and a workshop presentation and let me start just with the introduction of the first speaker. The speaker is the professor Jan Ellen. He is a professor at KU University Leuven in center of Instructional Psychology and Technology. He was the head of the educational support office in university and coordinator of expertise network school of education of the Association of KU Leuven University and vice dean education of the faculty of psychology and educational sciences. He is currently the academic leader of the teacher education program in behavioral sciences. The title of the speech of the professor Ellen this morning is making connections in distance education research based reflections on hybrid classrooms. Professor Ellen the floor is yours. Can you put my slides on. So I will talk about making connections and about a number of reflections about hybrid classrooms. Now before I start with that I have to say that I'm here because a previous PhD student of mine asked to do so and she is also partly co-organizing this conference and I promised that whenever a PhD student of mine would ask me something I would try to always do that. Nevertheless I have a number of mixed feelings. I have no solutions to sell. I have only reflections and it might be that you go home with much more questions than answers at the end of my talk. Moreover I'm not going to be exhaustive in any way. The topic is too interesting, too broad to actually cover. What will we try to do? I will present a challenge, a proposed solution and then I will discuss it a little bit with pro and con and then we will try to have some conclusions. What's the challenge? The challenge is that from two years ago basically they announced that from next academic year on so that means basically the end of September of this year we will have to or are encouraged or are allowed to give new, totally new educational masters which means teacher education programs at the master level at level seven. Not only in one location that we are totally used to, meaning in Leuven, but distributed over nine different locations spread all over our region flanness. That's kind of a challenge because we are not used to that. The first question was of course how many people are we going to hire? The answer was probably none. They came up with a brilliant solution. What are we going to do? We are going to use hybrid classrooms. Hybrid classrooms as from a technical managerial perspective was a very good investment. It does not take a whole lot of personnel. It takes some kind of technology to start with. With the hybrid classroom they had the idea that it is basically a classroom but that what's happening in the classroom can also be attended from a distance either at specific locations. For instance somebody is teaching in Leuven and somebody is sitting here in Breuge and some other students might be sitting at home. So they said this is going to be a wonderful multi-campus model and we are going to solve all our problems by using those hybrid classrooms. I want to approach this issue a little bit from a distance education research perspective because I think it's extremely valuable what has happened in the past on distance education and on distance education research. We all know that traveling in space or at least attempting to travel in space and all these efforts to try to go to the moon has helped us a lot in gaining a lot of understanding in all kinds of different fields. We do not only know how to lift a rocket, we also develop new kinds of clothes, new kinds of food. We all kind of are very creative. We have all kinds of new insights in physics and basically my claim is that while this might represent face-to-face education that the introduction of a barrier, a real barrier as we do in distance education helps us to think about that face-to-face education in a much much better way. So traveling to the moon relates to physics as distance education relates to education in my view. That's why I think we really have to look at that kind of research. That research has a very, very rich history and I still remember and then we are talking about the 80s that we start to develop our first distance education course. At that time some of you will still know that was mainly printed materials. And so we said okay if we want to use printed materials in the absence of any kind of personalized teacher how do we have to construct those texts in order to help the students to actually learn it. And first we went to very interesting research proposed by Kinch and Van Dijk on how people process information. And you have the basic form that's in the text and then you have a text base that you construct and by the interaction with the text and your prior knowledge you create a situation model. That's not an easy process. So the better you write your text the better the students will be able to actually learn what you want them to learn. And so immediately we got an understanding that okay yeah we can do something in distance education provided that we are deeply reflective deeply reflective and deliberate about the construction of our texts. That research has been followed by a lot of other research for instance revealing the importance of text structures. Research has revealed that there is a different text structure when you have a comparison or when you want to explain cause effect relationships or whatever. Moreover ample research has shown that if you use signaling if you reveal much better the text structure that students learn better learn much more. Again an indication that if you do it in a deliberate way if you design your text you get you can form better head in supporting students. This has and most of you know that of course has not only been done in in in kind of text base but also in multimedia research. Mayor and his group they have identified a number of multimedia principles. Multimedia principles that basically said how you have to design your multimedia information in order to support better learning by students. And all this research all this research has been done in basically a distance education setting because it was always the student alone with the information they had to study alone without any presence without any actual immediate help of of teachers. Technology has evolved. Multimedia have been basically replaced by hypermedia. Text has been replaced by hypertext. And I think it's important that we still are aware of the tremendous implications of that kind of evolution. Before hypermedia before hypertext except for some of course obvious exception the idea was that students processed information in a linear way. But now with hypertext they get learner control. They get learner control. It's the learner gets tools gets gets the opportunity to select what kind of information will be handled in what sequence that information will be processed and what information will actually be processed. That's given us a major insight. A major insight namely that teachers that learners have control over their own learning. That they can make decisions. They can make decisions but also sometimes that is a little bit problematic. So we have started to discuss on what issues on what dimensions are we gonna give learner control to the learner to the students and on what dimension do we try to keep that control to the system. So we have now a much better thanks to that distance education research a much better understanding of learner control shared control or system control. Again another idea that our better understanding thanks to distance education research has helped to to identify an aspect of learning and supporting learning that's extremely important. And again we have come to the conclusion that we can do a whole lot of things provided that we adequately designed that environment. The most apparent kind of research that has been done is are all the reflections that have been made in how can we in a distance education course make the teacher there what can we do in a distance education course to make support of learning available. Of course there's the old literature on advanced organizers by Isabel who already indicated that if you prior to the text give some kind of glance of what's gonna come that can be understood by the student that the student it activates the prior knowledge that is relevant then that student will be able to better process that information. It has not been limited to advanced organizers a whole lot of research has been done on action questions. And again it's because of that distance education research that we have become aware much more about the importance of those questions or even better about the kind of questions that are there. We have learned that you have different that you have questions at different levels of cognitive complexity and we have learned also that there's a huge difference if you put a question in front of processing the information or only offer it after the information. That has different effects on learning that has different effects on how students process that information and again that distance education research has shown us that we need to actually design those things. Of course that has happened also in more interactive environments. It's a little bit a real wet dream of a whole lot of people to develop intelligent tutoring systems and perhaps to actually produce those is not as important as it is to try to do that because it has forced us to really think about what is the most optimal learner model? What is the most optimal domain model? How do we describe our pedagogical interventions? We have become much more sophisticated in how we talk about pedagogical intervention because if we want to do that in a technological system we have to be totally explicit and of course you know of those ACT invention that really some people have succeeded Anderson for instance, succeeded to really make a course on physics not the easiest topic in actually doing that without the presence of a teacher. Another stream that has been addressed a lot in distance education research is student learning. We have become aware that those students and they're learning that is important and then there are different learning functions and those learners all has proposed that there are different learning functions and some of the functions at a certain moment can be done by the students others can be done by the environment. We have the 3P model of Bix really bringing forward an in-depth understanding of all the factors that help us to understand what makes that learning happen how does it come about and I do not want to avoid or miss the opportunity to point to the work of Jan Vermeunt for instance who really started to do his research in a distance education setting at the Open University of the Netherlands and a whole lot of us have used the inventory learning styles and there has been a whole stream of research being done on that topic and they have revealed that depending on the self-regulation skills of students, your intervention, your control of the situation may be detrimental or actually be constructive. They have shown that if you have students with really strong regulation skills and you actually tell them all the time what they have to do, how they have to do it, when they have to do it, that gradually their self-regulation skills diminish. So it's terribly important that we design that environment by taking all these factors really into account. So my claim is a little bit that distance education because it is non-automatic, it does not happen. You cannot say I start distance education tomorrow, you have to prepare it because it's non-evident, it cannot be at hoc. It is difficult and that's a good thing because because it is difficult, we have learned a lot because we had to conquer those difficulties and we have learned a number of lessons. First is that in view of adequately supporting students' learning, there is a need of understanding learning. We have to understand what it implies. We have to understand what cognitive processes are involved in what we actually want to do. Moreover, we have learned that supporting learning is not evident, not self-evident, so we have to think about it. We cannot afford in distance education unless we want to offer poor quality and that's not what we want. We cannot afford to simply do it. We really have to design the environment to think about how we can construct it. Now in order to do that, we need more research on learning and supporting learning and we also need more professionalization in the field of design. Now, based on that research, am I kind of reticent, hesitant to actually adopt that kind of brilliant solution of the hybrid classroom? Because basically, if we take that barrier away, we lose the advantages of that barrier. It becomes far too easy and we see it. Have you seen all those screen costs, all those web lectures that have been made and the only thing is you have a talking head providing information. Given the image that distance education is a teacher centered activity, that it is about providing information that it does not meet deliberate decisions. Oh yeah, there are decisions needed. If you want to take a video, you have to take care of what shirt you're wearing because otherwise the image gets blurred and all kinds of things. There's a whole lot of technological considerations that are made. But at the essence of what teaching, what supporting learning is actually about, this is a major danger. Nevertheless, we might also be a little bit interested because of course we do have problems in distance education and one of them is attrition. Drop out. If we learn that for MOOCs, a completion rate of 30% is regarded to be good, I don't want to tell my vice chancellor that. If I make a teacher education program and 70% of my students drops out, I get fired. So we do have a problem and of course, whereas people have started to think yeah, where does that problem come from? Our work-life balance, different expectations. It's a whole lot of cognitive load. If you have to do it on your own, learning might be a social endeavor. All kinds of good reasons. The question is, of course, do we actually understand it? And a lot of people have said, okay, if that distance is a problem, a distance is a problem, then we have to try to create presence. Obviously, Garrison and Wogan, they have clearly indicated that you have a real interesting educational experience if you have cognitive presence. If you're not there, if you're not engaged, the probability that you will learn anything significant, anything interesting is pretty low. They also have said that there should be some immediacy or that it helps. And research shows that if there is immediacy, at least it has a positive effect on the perceptions of students' immediacy of a teacher, of things that happen. They have the feeling that they are recognized. They have feeling that they are part of a broader community and they get some control. They get some help. They get some structure. It helps. And also, it shows that, for instance, social presence is important. That if you are in a distance education context, that you want not to be on your own. And if that's not the case, the probability of dropout is high. We can understand that by looking, for instance, at self-determination theory. Ryan and Deci, they claim that they are three basic cognitive needs or cognitive factors that have to be taken into account. And that if they are not taken into account or not fully satisfied, your motivation drops. And they are competence. And that's not a problem. Competence, we can make our design, our environment in such a way that people get a feeling of, yeah, I can do this. There's autonomy. We can give them some learner control. So they say, okay, I can make choices. And there's also a kind of relatedness. People get motivated if they are related. They want to be linked to other people. And so if that's not the case, motivation might be a problem. And hence, you might get to dropout. So it's a very interesting reason to look at hybrid classes. There's another one. And that is that we have, of course, to accept that there are a number of limitations. And we can dream. We can think about all kinds of things. But nevertheless, there are a few limitations. And those limitations are often technological. If you go to a conference like here and you have a presentation of people who have invented a new tool, it can solve all problems. If you take it home, it seems that you get all kinds of new problems that are not really solved. So it's not, we are not yet there. There's, they say, okay, it's personalized. And you have an idea, whoa, that's great. And then it means that you can type in your name and that when the screen's open, it says hi and in your name. Is that personalization? Yeah, it's personalization. Okay, it's portability access. Not everybody can get access. It's a nice, nice, nice tool. Last week we had a discussion of a tool on automatic scoring. Yeah, that would be great. And they had a solution. Only it costs 500 euros per student per year. Now that's basically half of what the students pay at our university. So that's not really a valuable solution. There are limitations at the technological side. There are also limitations with regard to support. Because there are a whole lot of things we do not know. For instance, cultural awareness. I've briefly touched upon all those instruments to analyze learning approaches. So one of my students, she's from Kinshasa in Congo and she has tried to use those instruments and they simply totally failed. So we have built that whole literature on learning approaches on a Western conception of what studying and learning actually implies. So if we then design those learning environments based on those conceptions, those are not that great research that's there, we might fail. And last but not least with regard to limitations, we all know that distance education and the design of distance education courses is a team effort. It's really complicated, it's difficult. And so you need different types of expertise. Unfortunately, again, money is limited often and so it might be that your team is not really the ultimate optimal team and that you might miss some points. We all come now basically to agree on some kind of a notion of how we can describe learning and there are different aspects to it. We kind of more or less agree that learning is a constructive process, that it is cumulative, that you use your prior knowledge in order to understand new things, that it is also self-regulated, that I cannot decide for my students how they are going to approach the cognitive tasks and that it is contextualized. It does not happen in totally fake one, it always happens in the context. And so based on that kind of social constructivist kind of perspective, we kind of have understood that for learning what matters is what the student does. The student learns what he or she is actually practicing, learns from the activities she or he is engaging in. Now from this social constructivist perspective, we learn something even perhaps more important, something that I think is often kind of more or less neglected. It is that learning in an educational setting is not the same as learning per se because what matters for learning in an educational setting is of course what the learner does, but also whether those activities are aligned to the educational goals. If I want my students to learn how to swim and they go and practice soccer, they're not going to learn how to swim. Now getting it aligned to the educational goals is far more difficult I think than we are used to acknowledge. And we have all been informed that in order to help students and metacognitive activities to be self-regulated, self-regulated in the sense aligning the learning activities to the educational goals, it's important that those students get some information on those goals. Well I think more and more research is showing that it's extremely difficult for students to understand our goals. There are a few indications there. The previous thing like this, I once called it instructional disobedience. There is a lot of research, very nice research on instructional disobedience. And basically what it means is yeah, we give students a whole lot of opportunities and we design it in a very very nice way. So we really are deliberate about it and then the student says fuck off. Nice exercises we don't make them. Oh this is the indicated sequence. I don't need them. We offer them support. Please call us. We are available for you. They don't call. They do not use the learning opportunities. Gradually the idea has been growing that students have instructional conceptions as the teachers or the designers of the learning environment have and it does not necessarily match. We as kind of great educators we want to change the world through education and so we go for deep, deep learning. We have to ask here all the students passing around what their major concern is. I was in the exam. I was reading a book on studying strategies and it even said yeah take care what you say about adequate study strategies because a study strategies for long long-term learning yeah might be totally ineffective for short-term learning. So take care on what you say. So when those instructional conceptions of designers on the one hand and learners on the other differ we might have a tremendous problem. There's a last bit is that yeah I told you that that we have become aware of the fact that that learning is contextualized the more and the more we seem to start to understand that our body is the first context. A lot of people have argued that why do we have the decimal system? Well because we have ten fingers most of us have. So it might be that also the problem is there that that our body is multi-sensorial and what we do in our environments is at this moment this is not multi-sensorial it's it's basically based on on words now now we have all great adventure pictures moving pictures because audio and visual that's what we mainly do. Okay so I'm started to be interested perhaps in the solution because learning in an educational setting is not self-evident learning in an educational system is inherently complex it's far too difficult for students to do it on their own you have to know a whole lot of things in order to do it right for students it's inherently intimidating and you have to learn something and somebody else will judge whether you actually learned it it is effortful so that's why we learned a number of new lessons in view of adequately supporting students there is a need not only for understanding learning but understanding learners supporting learners is not self-evident we need one way or the other multi-sensorial orchestrated presence to be able to adjust those instructional conceptions to be able to make clear to the students what it means to study in an educational setting so there is more need for research on learners and supporting learners more need for orchestration professionalization through console balance first I think we should all agree that most things we do not know and that there are no simple answers I always tell my students if there is some kind of new occasional innovation claiming oh we are going to solve the problem be aware don't trust them accept complexity accept that it is difficult and so from my perspective now I think we need to consider and learning and learners my proposal is that we safeguard thoughtfulness safeguard thoughtfulness that we make sure that we remain deliberate that we do not fall in the pitfall of an ad hoc kind of intervention an ad hoc kind of teaching but at the other side we also have to embrace learners and we will have to orchestrate presence I think we might do it by first analyzing the learning goals the learners the context then we might design the learning environment identify what learning task and what support but information with help with scaffolds and we might blend or try to figure out the blend that we are going to make what type of interaction is needed what learners need interaction what learners need synchronous interaction and of course what is the context what is possible and then we can try to orchestrate but first we have designed it and then we can orchestrate it adapt it to our specific learners get into interaction with them not necessarily with respect to the learning task but with respect to how they relate to those learning tasks what they mean for them and we can offer a designed and an orchestrated learning environment I want to end with what for me is a little bit a paradox for me it seems after I prepare this that the research on distance education now calls for research on the need for opportunities for physical contact in education for what learners for what learning is interaction needed and why for what learning or what learners is synchronous interaction needed and why for what learning what learners is synchronous multi-sensorial interaction needed and why for what learning or what learners is what combination of synchronous multi-sensorial interaction needed and why when do we need to smell each other when do we need to be able to touch one another in order to promote the land. So thank you for your attention, and please do not stop to dream to travel to the moon. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Ellen, for this inspiring and very interesting keynote speech. Now we will have time to do the questions for this keynote at the end of the next presentation. And now, to me, it's a pleasure to introduce the next speaker, which is Ive Pony, Senior Scientist, European Commission, a member of the Institute of Prospective and Technological Studies. And also, it's a very good friend of our association, of human association. Yes, OK, thank you. I had to take off my glasses so I didn't know where I was. Hello. Great pleasure to be here with all of you. Thank you also, Aiden, for inviting me to share with you some of the studies we're doing. And also, thanks again, Jan, for such a passionate keynote. See how passionate he is with learning. It's really fantastic to hear and see. I have the same passion with this topic, but I maybe do not jump around like that. But still, I share your passion for sure. I want to speak about also, obviously, more effective digital age learning. And I want to focus a bit more on educators and share with you some of the studies and the research we've been doing to try to advance our understanding and our practices in this area. But first of all, just to explain to you, because some of you might not know where I come from. Actually, I come from Belgium, or Flanders as well. But I live in Spain, in the south of Spain, in Sevilla, because I work for the European Commission. And the European Commission has its own research laboratories, its own research in-house kind of research laboratories which are aimed to do research, analysis, evidence, to support European policies. And you see, we have six different institutes all over Europe. We actually have also one in Belgium in here. There's this pointer working, let me see. There you see, in Gale, but it works, it works. In Gale, which is the institute for new materials and for nuclear safety, for example. So they do a lot of good research there as well. Anyway, so we're based in Sevilla and we do more socioeconomic kind of research on innovation, growth, and digital technologies. And of course, we do a lot of research also on education and employment issues. So what I would like to say with you is some studies, some research on teaching and learning practices in the digital age. Then I want to share with you some issues related to educators, teachers' digital competence. Talk about innovating professional development because that's of course very, very important for teaching and learning. And also share you a little bit of what we are doing on open education guidelines for academics. But first, maybe just to share with you from the European point of view is that digital skills, digital learning, digital teaching challenges are actually high on the European agenda. And you see there a number of communications from the European Commission or the European institutions which actually highlight challenges, opportunities, and come up with a number of actions which the Commission proposes to do itself or together with the member states to try to address digital education, digital learning, and digital skills challenges. This is quite significant because that 10 years ago this was not the case, but now it is on the European agenda. And probably I assume we'll get a new Commission and a new European Parliament of course very, very soon. And I assume that also again digital skills and digital learning will be strongly also on the European agenda. There's a second document which is the Council's recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning which was revised in 2018 which also would like to highlight because it defines eight key competences for lifelong learning of which digital competence, entrepreneurship competence, and personal social and learning to learn competence among the eight key competences for lifelong learning. You can find all these documents on the internet so I don't need, I don't want to get too much into details related to that. Okay, let's go to teaching and learning practices and share with you some of the results and some of the studies we've been doing. And first I would like to mention to you Selfie. Selfie is a tool, a free online self-reflection tool customisable for schools to help them deal with digital learning and digital teaching practices. Who heard already about Selfie? May I ask you to check? You see, we know some people. Okay, some people. So that's great that we get more people to learn about it. So Selfie is basically what a Selfie is. It's an instrument for schools to take a picture, to try to understand where they stand with the use of digital technologies and then to see what are the weaknesses are, what are the strengths, develop a plan for improvement. And this was actually proposed by the European Commission officially in October last year and it's part of this digital education action plan which I was referring to. So Selfie was designed by ourselves in Sevilla, our team together with a lot of experts from all over Europe. It is based on a conceptual model which is called Dichkamp-Orch, which is also published. And it is done in a collaborative design process with experts, more than 100 experts from all over Europe who collaborated with us after a successful pilot which we did in 2017 with 650 schools in 14 countries where we piloted the tool, then we improved the tool and this was in the end launched in October last year. So just to highlight that Selfie is not another survey. So we are not asking things to school so that we know things about schools what they do. Now this is a tool for the schools themselves so they understand actually what they are doing and to help them to improve. That means actually that Selfie generates a school report for reflection, for monitoring, for developing an action plan. It means also that the data for all who participate in Selfie are anonymous. They're owned by the schools and the schools can do with the data whatever they want. And Selfie now already is available in more than 30 languages which I think is quite significant. So why do I speak about Selfie is that I'm going to share with you some of the results of this self-reflection instrument which is now being used in many, many schools all over Europe and outside Europe. But to emphasize that this is based on an holistic kind of approach and that we know from research and from studies of course that if we want to make the change to more digital age, more effective digital age learning, this has to be done in a very systematic kind of way. You have to deal with leadership, you have to deal with assessment, you have to change your teaching and learning practices, you have to deal with continuous professional development and also your students of course also need to have the digital competences. So all these areas are addressed in the Selfie instrument. So today we almost 400,000 users of Selfie since it was launched in October last year. More than 4,000 schools participated and this is what I need to highlight also. So Selfie is done by school leaders, by teachers and by students to get the view of the whole school kind of understanding of the use of digital technologies and school environments. And here you see there's also 83% of student responses, 14% from teachers and 3% from these 400,000 are from school leaders. We have more than 40 countries have already participating in Selfie. Today the majority comes from Spain, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Turkey. But this is changing rapidly because for example this is also promoted now in Belgium, both by the Ministry of Education in Wallonia but also by the Ministry of Education of Flanders which is now also offered to schools here in Flanders to help them deal with digital technologies. To insist also that this is voluntary participation of schools, schools can participate, they can decide themselves. There's no one who's imposing the use of Selfie for them which means that the results I'm going to share with you are of course not representative. We have a huge amount of data, 400,000 kind of replies which is massive of course but we have to have a big caveat there because obviously the results are not representative but I want to share them with you anyway because it's not just about the statistics. This is about self-reflection so this is about understanding actually what the people themselves, the actors themselves think, how they make sense of these issues. And logically because somehow there is a positive, there is a self-selection in the sample, there's a positive bias towards technology adoption and actually you can see that in the results when we asked and you see there, so in blue are school leaders of responses and red are teacher responses and we asked them how do they stand to its innovation, to its adopting innovations and the majority actually say they are early adopters of new technologies and quite a big group regard themselves as innovators. So this is kind of a positive self-selection bias in the sample but what is interesting also what you see here is actually the difference between the perception of the ideas of school leaders against teachers where school leaders things they are much more innovative than teachers. Just something to think about. Now the results I will share with you is also again not only about the results but it's also about the things actually we are asking in selfie, we are asking schools to think about and one of the first question is about strategy, it's about do you have a digital strategy in your school? Very simple kind of question and a bit more than well almost half of them say they have but maybe more interesting we also ask if you have a digital strategy do you also involve your teachers in developing the digital strategy? And there again you have relatively positive responses. The third question here is about within your school asking school leaders, do you give opportunities to teachers to try out new ways of teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies? There for example you see that actually school leaders are much more convinced about that than teachers themselves there's a little difference there but still it is pretty high the overall responses. Going into the teaching and learning area again the importance lies with the type of issues we are trying to address here. So basically this means here we have responses from in blue school leaders and red teachers and then yellow students and you see some of the differences there also and also the statements which we give to school leaders, teachers and learners are about the same topics but they're not always the same kind of phrases. Anyway so what we are asking is about do you use digital technologies to tailor learning to students needs? We are asking about do you use digital technologies in your school to foster the creativity within your students? And there for example you see that teachers are much more convinced than students about this and then school leaders. Do you use digital technologies in your school to try to engage your students much more into the learning process? And you see the results, teachers believe more that they do that. Do you use digital technologies to foment collaboration between students in your school? And finally do you use these technologies for cross curricular kind of activities and projects? So these are the topics which I think most of us are familiar with which you see also in research and evidence and this is what we try to promote of course with the use of these technologies to foster creativity, to foster engagement, to foster collaboration between students. And you see that there are some differences of views also between teachers, school leaders and students because students always respond a bit lower than the other stakeholders. About online educational resources we ask school leaders and teachers if they search for online educational resources pretty high and we ask also if they create online or if they create digital resources and their responses are also pretty positive. But then again this is interesting because here teachers of course they declare they do more of these things than school leaders actually are aware of. The last area which I want to share with you for the moment now is the one on digital competence because I think we also know from policy but also from experience that fomenting students' digital competence is becoming a key competence to participate in society but also for learning as well. And things we are asking there is are students able to develop their digital skills across subjects? Do you encourage safe behavior, safe online behavior of your students within your lessons? Do you encourage responsible behavior online? Do you encourage checking the quality of information, checking of information as reliable and if it is of good quality? Do you learn to give credit to other's work using online information? Do you create digital content and do you learn to communicate through the use of digital technologies which are all things that actually students should acquire in our current day digital age kind of learning activities? And you see overall that actually school leaders think these are very, very important and they also more strongly believe that these things are done while in reality the responses from teachers and from students are a bit lower. Now as I said, these responses are not just about the statistics but about understanding what kind of issues that actually we want to promote to get to digital age learning. But we have also other kind of empirical results from Europe and this is a study just published on schools, ICT in education in 2018 and this is a representative data of ICT use in schools all over Europe and this confirms a bit here you can see for example the statistics obviously using ICT during the last three months it's a bit of a broad measure but anyway in the class for preparing lessons to create modified digital content to provide personal feedback and support to students and to communicate with parents and this goes from 90, 80 to kind of 60% of students whose teachers report to use ICT during the last months. But this was during the last nine months now there's also a question there about how intensive they make use of ICT in the classroom and I think these are quite interesting results so these are for SCAT one primary education SCAT two lower secondary SCAT three higher secondary upper secondary education and actually you see there that somewhere between 19, 15 and 30% of students in Europe have teachers who use ICT in more than 75% of their lessons. But what is actually for me more and more significant is this one because if you see this if you look at the same graph and you see the differences between member states or between is more than member states between European countries. So a number of countries, Malta, UK, Denmark, Slovenia Lithuania is just below there. I mean this is pretty, pretty high. A number of other countries, Iceland, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Portugal, Romania. This is quite, quite low. And this is consistently actually for all SCAT levels which I think is something very, very important for policy making of course also to take into account. We had this measure of 75% of lessons if you take a broader kind of one and they've also asked if they use ICT and 25% of lessons. Obviously the numbers go up and then it's somewhere between 70, 60 and 65% of students who clear that. But what I wanted to highlight here is the following actually because this same study was done in 2011, 2012 and this allows comparison. And this is actually quite significant because you see here from a new average around 30% to 71, 32% to almost 60%. So this somehow indicates that obviously ICT is more used in schools throughout Europe although again there are significant differences between European countries. So I spoke about schools but I would also like to share with you a couple of things about higher education because obviously many of us also very much interested in this topic. And for that actually I draw upon research we've been doing ourselves as well based on what we have established as we call the European Digital Competence Framework for Educators, which is something we published in 2017 which actually describes what kind of competences do educators need at all levels, primary, secondary, higher education, lifelong learning to be digitally competent. It has six areas, 22 specific competences describing what kind of competences educators need and also has six proficiency levels. Now I'm not going to explain this model to you because we'll have some results from what we then developed what we call a check-in self-reflection tool based on the model. We have more than 6,000 users but actually we have some results for higher education only almost 2,000 responses. Again not representative, I have to emphasize that and we have responses here from Spain, Portugal, England and Germany who've done this self-reflection tool. Now what kind of results come out of this self-reflection tool? So again it's an instrument so that educators become aware of the issues they are dealing with to go to digital age learning. So do you use digital technologies for students to actively participate in class? And here you see that basically 40% is kind of anecdotical kind of use saying that we use digital technologies to, as a stimuli, we use video, animations, cartoons, et cetera but it doesn't go really much, much further than that. Some do games, quizzes and a small group say that they really actively and systematically use digital technologies to actively engage their students into the learning process. Coming back to the digital competence which I said before we also asked questions here about if educators in higher education ensure that their students learn how to assess information, understand misinformation and bias of information they'll find on the internet which is probably, I think we all agree upon a key skill for all students in our current data types. And there actually you see that almost 30% a bit more say that occasionally I remind my students that all information they find online is not necessarily reliable. Some teach it, some say we really discuss it with my students about the accuracy of information and only a small group about 12% say we comprehensively discuss in our classes how information is generated, how it can be distorted, et cetera. But save a responsible behavior online. There again you see that the group says okay, I informed them to be careful with relying personal information online. I explain them the basic rules. We discuss and agree on the rules of conduct and a small group saying that I systematically develop these kind of skills and social rules with my students. So to share with you a couple of messages from this part is that you could argue, and this is not a surprise of course but ICD and education practices are certainly becoming more widespread. I mean, we have the evidence for that. But it's as clear also from the results that they seem to remain within the classical and structural education paradigm. If we ask about active involvement of learners, personalization, and more learner kind of oriented practices, we see actually that they are less widespread. What was also interesting, I would like to take away is that actually we have different views between school leaders, teachers, and students, which is definitely something also that we have to think about. But sometimes we only address teachers and we don't know or we're not aware how our students think about these things. It was a bit also said by Jan before that you have to see and understand how students think about their learning processes. Definitely important, I think, is that student digital competences, safe, responsible, and critical use of these technologies is on the agenda, but I would say not really predominantly, which might be a bit of a concern. And also to highlight that we've seen the data that if you look at schools, but I think it's also for higher education the case, but anyway, we see major differences between European countries, and I think that's also the case within universities, within Europe. So, the next part will be a bit shorter. To speak about digital competence, we also asked in the selfie tool how confident teachers feel in using digital technologies for preparing lessons, for class teaching, to provide feedback and support to students, and to promote, to communicate with students and parents about learning issues. These are quite positive, you could say, about 60, 70 percent, but then we also have, going back to this other kind of data source, more representative data for schools in Europe, and here they made a cluster analysis to create clusters on highly digitally active, confident and supported teachers, highly digitally active and confident teachers which are rather low level of support and less digitally active, confident and supported teachers. And then again, I've put in red there that just half, oh no, not just half, half of all teachers somehow are in the cluster that they are less digitally active, confident and supported teachers. So the more advanced ones are around 33, 25 and 24 percent. We also asked this about higher education and asked educators how they develop their teaching, digital teaching skills. And here you see some of the results that they say, I try to improve my skills through reflection and experimentation. I use a range of resources to develop my digital teaching skills. I discuss with peers how to use digital technologies to innovate and improve in the case of practice. And more advanced, you could say, I help colleagues in developing their digital teaching strategies. We could actually make also because we have six proficiency levels in this self reflection tool, and you can actually label them to the so-called what we have also in the language levels, A1 to B2. And then the result, although again, I must emphasize, so this is a small sample, 2000 users, it's not representative. But anyway, you see here that most of them regard to be in B1 and in B2, small group in C1 and C2. This is self perception. We asked them how they rate their own competence. But then actually we can compare this with the real results because they did then the self reflection tool. We asked about their practices and based on their scores, we can actually compute their real scores. And this was actually a bit of a surprise to me because usually we see quite significant differences between self perception and real practice. But in this case, it's not so different. So this line is the real results, the bars are the self reflection kind of results. And they coincide quite well. Actually, you see that they're actually in reality, less people in A1, less people in A2, more in B1 and more in C1. So in this case, actually, the real results were a bit better, maybe you could say, than the self reflection results. Don't ask me why, but this is what came out of this. Throwing on the OECD, tell a study, which is a study on continuous professional development of teachers, secondary education teachers. We know that teachers have declared their needs for training on ICT skills for teaching, on teaching for diversity, on student counseling, behavioral issues, on teaching transversal, soft and future skills. So this is needs for professional development which teaches themselves declared. But we also know from Talis that there are a number of bottlenecks, 51 declares that sort of professional development conflicts with my work schedule, there's a lack of incentives, lack of support from suppliers, and some teachers even regard this as expensive, which I find a bit of a strange category, but anyway, it's there, it's in the OECD results. This one is actually interesting, if you then go back to the results from the representative survey, you see actually that 60% of teachers, I mean, okay, 60% of students having teachers who declare to learn about ICT in their own time. 60%. Continuing about continuous professional development needs, we also discussed about that in the selfie tool, and we asked if teachers in their schools are able to discuss their needs for CPD, for continuous professional development. Teachers say a bit more than, school leaders say a bit more than teachers. And they also ask if they are able to participate in CPD, school leaders believe it much more stronger than teachers, and we asked also if teachers do CPD, if they also share their experiences within the schools. There again, school leaders are much more convinced that these things happening than teachers themselves. So from this, I would like to emphasize the following kind of things about one third, one fourth of schools in Europe have highly visually active, confident, and supported teachers, only one third, one fourth. There again, major differences between European countries. There's a strong need for digital competence and for digital pedagogies. And I would like to argue also that educators are quite aware of these needs. They feel somehow also relatively confident, but the reality really is that much more needs to be done and much more educators should be involved. And you could argue that probably this certainly not be done in their spare time only. Going a bit more into depth into continuous professional development and especially innovating continuous professional development to promote much more effective teaching and learning. We can also draw here upon the OECD report which was published this year on Measuring Innovation and Education where they also speak about innovation and teacher professional development. And where they basically say that actually what we see emerging in countries, OECD countries, is more informal teacher professional development as a new emerging and encouraging trend which is gradually happening, although it is happening slowly. And there is somehow also the conviction that these kind of informal peer learning based kind of professional learning activities are more effective than formal training because they are very strongly connected to the needs educators that teachers have. Actually, and we also did some research on that and I would like to just share with you that I cannot give you too many results but we just published actually a report on innovating professional development in higher education with a number of case studies and a similar one on innovating professional development in school education, in compulsory education with a number of case studies as well. So the kind of questions we are dealing there with is how higher education institutions are promoting or supporting innovative teaching practices in their institution? How can it support academic career paths? How to overcome these known barriers because we know the barriers to CPD and how to address teachers' real needs? And does it in the end lead to more effective teaching and learning? And we have quite a lot of, I mean, in-depth kind of case studies in these two reports which obviously I cannot now share with you and I think there again, the obstacles are mentioned and here you see an overview of the different case studies. There are 11 case studies done in this kind of report. You can have a quick look there. So we have Dublin, Finland, and that U4 network, LSE, King's College. I mean, you see the different kind of examples there which we see that actually are kind of emerging practices where they try to do professional development in a different way, much more bottom-up, much more informal, much more based on peer learning and these kind of the cases are described in the reports. And it's the same for the one on school education where we have an inventory of 30 examples and you see there the images of these examples and where we also did a number of in-depth kind of case studies which are all reported in these reports which are again kind of examples of emerging practices which try to tackle these barriers which we know that exist related to CPD. Make sure that training becomes much more informal, much more easy to access to, for example, also much more blended. I mean, there are many, many, many good examples there in these reports which I would like to highlight. So, okay, yeah. Obviously, one of these examples is MOOCs. Massive Open Online courses which are also used for teacher training, of course, not just for everybody or for students as well but also for teacher training. And we published an article on that on a case study with that in Spain which offering actually MOOCs for teacher training, MOOCs for teacher training, which are the MOOCs which are nano, MOOCs, small kind of MOOCs actually usually via an app, via the mobile phone, very small micro kind of learning activities. So, they both have traditional MOOCs for teacher training, small kind of nano MOOCs, and then, of course, also teachers do overall MOOCs. And what I would like to, what I wanted to highlight here is actually, and that also goes back to what Jan said before, is that what we see here on completion rates is actually, okay, that was my pointer, done. Anyway, it doesn't matter. So, you see right there that completion rates for general teacher training MOOCs is around 6%. The completion rates for the nano MOOCs, the small, modernized kind of, very targeted kind of learning MOOCs is 25%. So there again, it's a proof that if you tailor and design your learning, as Jan said before, towards the needs and towards teachers, this can work. From this teacher training MOOCs, we see that actually we compare the participation against the overall Spanish teacher participation. And we saw actually, we have a bit of over-representation of teachers between the 40 and 50 years kind of group. So they are more represented in doing this kind of teacher training MOOCs. And in terms of gender, we also have a slightly over-representation and an under-representation of female teachers following these MOOCs. We compare these statistics each time against the overall data for Spain in terms of teacher. I'm not going to specify a bit more on that. Just to, we also asked about expected benefits from MOOCs, and what is interesting here that you see the difference between the teacher training MOOCs, the teacher training MOOCs, and doing MOOCs in general, which are not specifically focused for teachers, for teacher training. And you see somehow differences in the added value they see. The overall MOOCs, the general MOOCs are much more to increase my chances in the labor market. For the other ones, we see to keep up to date, to keep myself up to date in my current profession and to allow me to do new and other things in my current profession are actually more significant kind of for teachers. Also very important is actually from this MOOC, Knowledge Database, which we have, is that actually what we see is that the higher the level of digital competence of the MOOC learners, the more likely they are doing more MOOCs. And that, and they are participating in MOOCs, completing the MOOCs, or completing the MOOCs with certificates. But just to confirm that actually, obviously digital competence is needed also to participate in MOOC learning. So from that part, I would like to argue that MOOCs can widen access, and we have evidence for that, to professional development for teachers. And we see that new bottom-up and informal models of teacher professional learning can actually remove the known barriers to traditional PD forms. They seem to work, but there is more evidence needed on their impact. But actually they are not very well known to the additional professional development providers and within higher education institutions. But we usually see that the mix of activity, of contacts and modes of delivery work quite well, focusing on real educators needs and practices. And in school education, we've also some evidence that actually including third-party providers, non-profit sector for example, industry can actually also widen the content expertise and provide more engaging experiences also for teacher professional development. Many examples actually are outside of the official professional development provisions, which is of course, and many examples are not accredited kind of learning, which is a bit of a concern you could say. For higher educations, the result would be to say that we should consider more, multiple, more diversified offers for professional development activities with central coordination within higher education institutes. And we should say to education authorities that they should incentivize these forms of professional peer learning and work to offering them to all teachers as part of accredited learning. To wrap up, one minute more, because I get the sign here that they have to stop. We also recently published what we call the Practical Guidelines on Open Education for Academics, which is actually really what it says there. It's providing concrete practical advice to academics based on the Open Education framework, which we published in 2016, which has 10 dimensions of Open Education, access, content, leadership, recognition, these kind of 10 dimensions of Open Education. And based on these, we developed specific guidelines for higher education academics to if they want to develop Open Education. And just to give you a screenshot of that, so what we basically do is we explain, we have a checklist for self-reflection so that they can think, okay, and we give advice, we explain about access, what is widening access to education? For example, providing all your educational materials as OERs under an open license and provide it open to everybody. I mean, these kind of things we all addressed, and we also explain the advantages of Open Education for academics, for learners, for education institutions, and for society. I just wanted to give you the screenshot of that if someone would be interested, you can have a look at that. Finally, I also wanted to think about actually, if we develop now guidelines for Open Education, we also think about, it was discussed also yesterday, about artificial intelligence. And actually, we published a report in November 2018 last year about the impact of AI for teaching, learning, and education, which you can freely download. And based on this work, we're now going to develop some work also to think about how can we involve teachers, educators, not just as receivers, but also as co-designers of kind of artificial intelligence that would be ethical, trusted, efficient, and useful, and consensual within the European education area. So this is kind of future work we're going to do. And actually, part of this will also be mentioned tomorrow by Ilka Tuomi, which will be collaborate with this work, so he will give a presentation on that tomorrow. And then, I have to thank you for your attention. And well. Thank you very much for your presentation and for sharing with all of us the research that you are doing in your institute. Now it's time for questions from the audience, but before let me just mention that it's possible to follow this session online in online webcast. I don't know how many people are following now, but yesterday it was more than 200 people. In any case, welcome to our distance watchers and distance followers. And also let me mention that you can share your ideas, your comments, your thoughts using Twitter. And if you will do that, you can use the hashtag Eden19. Okay, and now it's time for questions. Do you have any questions for our presenters, for our keynote speaker today? No, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes. First of questions. Steve, thank you very much for that speech. Managed to catch all of it right from the start and it was very clear what you're talking about. One thing I wanted to ask though, do you make a distinction between digital literacies and digital competencies? And if so, what is that difference? Thank you, thank you, Steve. Good question. I mean, we have defined digital competence as the combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, because that's also within the European framework defined as this. And then we have defined digital competence as a safe, critical, and responsible use of digital technologies for participation in society and economy and for any kind of activities you do. We've defined for that like 21 specific competencies, which range from being able to deal with information, being able to find information, assess information, critically understand information, being able to communicate with digital technologies, which includes also digital citizenship, for example, being able to create digital content. It's also about security, privacy, and identity, and it's also about problem solving to the use of digital technologies. So that means basically that, coming back to your question, now that we actually have a quiet, our definition of digital competence, as we defined it at the European level, under the DICOM framework, is quite a broad and quite an encompassing kind of definition. Some might define digital literacy as a little bit more narrow, but then I also must admit that actually, I think we should not go into too much of kind of terminological kind of differences, because it's very often also the result of tradition, an academic tradition, if in certain countries they speak more about digital literacy, in other countries they speak about digital competence, other countries they speak about media literacy, others speak about information literacy. I mean, there is a bit of a, it's true that there are many, many kind of different approaches there, but for me, and I would like to argue that, I mean, I think they are very, very similar. There are many, many overlapping parts in these kind of different definitions. For me, the important part from all this is actually that any definition, obviously, but also the case with digital literacy, go behind the simple learning to use digital technologies to do certain things. It is about becoming really, really literate, becoming critical, understanding, knowing what it means to use digital technologies, not just being able to use the technologies. That's why also we say, for example, that especially with our so-called digital natives, which may be heavy users of these technologies, but use doesn't necessarily mean that you are digitally competent, that you have this kind of critical understanding what it means, you know? And I think that's very important. Question? I can give you the microphone. The microphone's here. No, no, no, no. It's coming down here. Okay, yeah. Thank you, Rory McGrale at the Basque University in Canada, Canada's Open University. And I'd like to commend the speakers on focusing on learning. I've been at quite a few educational conferences where the focus has been on the learners, learner satisfaction, et cetera, which are all very nice. But as educators, our job is to promote learning and you focused on that. Now, Jan, you put in a list of at the end there that you need to do this and you need to do that and you need to do another thing. And I looked at it, our university isn't doing any of those things. We have 45,000 students. We have the highest employment rate of any graduates in our province. We have the highest satisfaction rate from our students. Little, if any, of the things that you have up there and you're saying that we need to do. Is there an explanation for that? Yes. It's an interesting debate because and I've been thinking a lot about it and I think it is, I think we underestimate what could be done more. As we, I do not know the exact situation that you're talking about, but I think in a number of higher education institutions we are highly privileged. And basically, we do not have to teach. We simply have to give some kind of context because we have a selection system. And so we select, and so instead of bringing people much further, select those who are already very good. And of course, okay? Okay, okay. Overall, people who know me a little bit also know that I hardly say ever you actually have to do something. Only thing that I have tried to do is indicate what might help. It sounds like a European speech almost, no? That's what we do at the European level. We always say the same, also. We don't impose anything. We can only help tools to change, to learn from each other, et cetera, et cetera. I'm a diligent and convinced European. Okay, any other question? I have a question for Professor Eilen. At the beginning of your keynote, you mentioned that there will be a new educational master in eight or nine different locations in the region of Launers. Were you involved in constructing the so-called hybrid classroom in this setting? And if so, can you mention some specific things? Can you repeat the last part? And if so, can you mention some specific things you or your team instructed or changed regarding this case? Whether I was involved in the decision? In the construction of the hybrid classroom? Of the hybrid classroom? Yes. Yesterday we had a meeting, that's why I could not be here. And so now at our university, it is, yeah, they presented the whole kind of system they have. And I was totally frustrated because two months ago, they asked me to chair a working group for phase two of the hybrid classroom. Basically to tell you what they will actually implement is basically a unidirectional classroom. Phase two is that you can actually interact with the people that are at the distance. So I was a little bit angry. A lot of work to be done there. That's why I said it's a technical managerial kind of proposal. Okay, another question here. A microphone for the, that is not in the room. Professor, what are your, what are the most important findings on the instructional disobedience you talked about or your thoughts about that? Well, the question for Jan, I think, no? So you asked about what the findings were about the instructional disobedience? Yeah, of course it's a little bit of provocative kind of notion because it is from the perspective of the designer that you say they're disobedient. That's what I wanted to say. So what we have found is that in numerous cases, and we did that through log file analysis, and that you can, as soon as you look at it from that perspective, it's kind of really amazing. Peter Gutierrez also done some great work on it. It's that you offer a whole lot of opportunities, and if you look at what students do, that they simply do not use it. And so we have done kind of work in, how can we, on the one hand, and people also here, some of them might even be in the room, have done some work on it that, you want, of course, your students to be motivated, so you want them to give them some control. But if you give them control, the basic question then becomes, on what do you give them control? And some people here in the neighborhood, they did a study in which they told students that the system was adaptive to what they did, so that they were more or less in control. And on the other group, they said, no, no, no, no, no, we made a good system for you, yeah? But the system did exactly the same. And those who were told to have some kind of control did better. They had no control. Of course, I'm not saying that we now have to lie to students, not my purpose, but I think it shows that how students think, how they think about the context, how they think about what is required from them, what is in there for them, all kinds of influences, what they actually do. One of the things, for instance, we see, and yes, we are not the only ones at our universities, we see that our students only start to study pretty late in the semester. That's, of course, a pity, because then they have to do everything in the end, or at the end, and then the only thing they can do is try to have some kind of survival strategies to pass the exams. But whatever we do in the beginning, they hardly use. Okay? Probably it is because, of course, they have a whole, at least students at my university, they have a whole lot of other things to do. One of the most important things they have to do is to find a partner. And that's kind of more engaging than the kind of things we offer them. But if you want, you will pass on some kind of literature. Okay, we will have time for one question more here. Oh, my name is Rufian, I'm from Brazil, and I would like to ask Professor's question. I've been a company in your framework with great interests because in Brazil, definitely we have to work on teachers' digital capabilities and all of that. And I was wondering, you've been talking about this shift of a more informal approach to strategy to teacher professional development. Is this something that you've been noticing more in higher education, or in K through 12 education as well? Okay, thanks, so the question about this more informal kind of what we call now educators' professional learning. And well, we've done, I think in both. Actually, I've not really, because we've done the two reports, we've done case studies for both school education and higher education. And actually, we find quite a lot of examples in both. I mean, in the school education part, we have like 30 examples and six case studies. In the other one, we have 11 kind of case studies. So we find examples in both. So I cannot really say if this is now a trend which is more higher education and school education, I would be difficult to say, I think. Okay. Last question before we move to the presentation of the workshop, please. Thank you very much. This is Professor Hamdi Abdulaziz from Hamdan-Muhammad Smart University Dubai United Arab Emirates. It's very nice to see these things are going here and this benchmarking work. My question is, if we have like baseline data like five years ago, would it be used as a benchmark to make or to know the difference between what has been done before in five years, as a background. And these results of your work could be used as a benchmark for pedagogical analytics in the future so that it could be replicable somewhere else in Middle East, for example, or other countries. So my question in fact is, how can I depend on your results as a benchmark for other countries when I speak about or work about the pedagogical analytics? Okay. Thank you. It definitely a very relevant issue, benchmarking, which is also a very sensitive issue as well, no? Because we know also how strongly some of our countries react on PISA data. And actually what we actually now with this kind of the selfie tool, the self-reflection tool, we explicitly say that it should not be used for benchmarking. First of all, because it is kind of a self-reflection tool, so it's not representative. So you cannot start going to benchmark if the data not representative. No, because that would be really, really tricky. And actually more substantial, we want to give a different message. We don't want to give the message of making sure that you are the best, also for schools to try to say that you have the best to celebrate excellence. What we want to promote is improvement, progress. Basically saying that wherever you are as a school, as a student, also as an educator, we like to encourage you to improve. So we're not saying that everybody has to be the pioneer, but we are trying to say that every educator has to somehow think and reflect and see what are the sign of weaknesses and then improve. So these kind of tools, which we're developing are more kind of improvement tools than benchmarking tools. Very much. Quickly react on this actually, and it's also a great opportunity to use these tools as a reference for defining also curricula for universities and take actually into consideration a competence-based, let's say, aspects, because it's very important that at the end, curricula and new types of learning in general, when defining education, is important to always reflect the labor market. And in this regard, also the digital labor market, with all this evolution of digital skills. Now I guess I have to come to the labor market presentation. Okay, let me introduce Angelica de Ropoulos, which is a member of the European Commission on European Skills, Competence and Qualifications, to make a brief 10 minutes introduction of the workshop, the new Europas framework and European digital credentials. Thank you very much. Congratulations for the great conference and thank you that you all came to hear experts in the field around open education. So if I can, I will try to be brief because we'll have a workshop later on. So over the past two decades, the digital revolution has changed how the labor market matches people with jobs. Nowadays, people find their jobs mainly online and employers increasingly manage their HR and recruitment processes with IT. Modern jobs matching instruments with skills at the centers of the job matching process. Talent platforms like job boards, social media platforms and crowdsourcing marketplaces have become the cornerstone for the functioning of the labor market. According to SEDEFOP's European Skills Forecasting Project, SEDEFOP is actually the agency of the commission which deals with education training. Mentioned that by 2025, about 48% of all job opportunities in Europe will need to be staffed by people with higher education qualifications. In the near future, 90% of jobs in careers such as engineering, accounting, nursing and many more will require some level of digital skills. Around 170 million people in Europe which corresponds around 44% of adult Europeans have low or no digital skills. Although most jobs currently require basic level of digital skills, as we also heard before from Eve. So digital technologies offer an excellent opportunity to make labor markets more efficient and to tackle issues of skills gaps. Talent platforms such as job boards or online professional networks will better match supply and demand for skills. A 2015 study from McKinsey estimates that this trend has a potential of more than 5.1 million additional jobs and a 360 billion increase in GDP in the 16 European countries covered in the study. I can also share with you this study later on. So here we see actually the office environment 30 years ago, as you can see, there is no computer, there is not even a fax, nothing digital, and actually the office environment today. These pictures actually corresponds to the working life of one individual. As you can see, by working, we're living more and we actually require in the context of the lifelong learning more and more digital skills, a new type of skills and learning. Here we actually also see three latest trends of the labor market, which is globalization, detaillization, and demographic developments, and also the green economy that changes completely how the labor market functions today. But the question is actually how we overcome the skills gap. Of course, with initiatives that also my colleague before introduced, but also with other, let's say, tools and instruments that now the European Commission wants to put forward. So in order to respond to these disruptive changes and the current and future skills gaps, the European Commission actually is helping people to discover the skilling and upskilling pathways and how to cope with job transition opportunities. More precisely, the Commission focuses on strengthening mobility within the EU, ensuring transparency and comparability of skills and qualifications in Europe, providing transparency and qualifications in order to support recruitment through validation and recognition, but also and very important, we like to enhance the cooperation between the different public employment services across EU. To achieve these goals, the Commission focuses its initiatives on two main elements, on the creation of European open standards for an open and inclusive digital labor market, and also at the same time, by monitoring the potential of labor market digitization. So with our initiatives in the digital labor market, we pursue three main goals. First, we want to better link education and training with the labor market in order to ensure that people have equal access to best opportunities, working opportunities, but also training and education opportunities. Second, we want to ensure transparency and for information on skills in the digital labor market. And third, we need, as I actually mentioned before, open and fair access to information on skills, jobs, and training opportunities. So for this reason, the Commission doesn't work. Sorry for this. So I can... Yeah, maybe we can slide down to some time. So for this reason, actually, the Commission introduced new digital tools. Probably most of you already know the current Europas, which consists of a portfolio of five documents. But in order to respond to these destructive changes of the labor market, the Commission wanted to make it more digital, more modernized, and more interactive. So for this reason, it introduced the new Europas, which actually, it's a portfolio, because it's from, with a portfolio. It also includes, it's dynamic because it includes also information about the training opportunities and jobs across EU. And also it's based on interoperability mechanisms, because it interacts with other existing European initiatives, like the European Qualification Framework for Lifelong Learning, and also ESCO, the European Classification of Skills, Competencies, Qualifications and Occupations, that we'll also introduce later on. So as part of the new Europas, the Commission introduced also a framework on digital science credentials. Eve before mentioned the Digital Education Action Plan. The action three of the Digital Education Action Plan, four is seen actually that the Commission should develop in a way a tool and a framework which includes a set of digital tools and standards for documenting skills and learning achievements of an individual, in order to in a way ensure that compatibility with other digital existing national initiatives, so that an employer that receives a credential, for example from Malta, will be able to understand the credential in Greece or in another EU country. So the Europas Digital Science Credential will be tampered proof and made of six elements. So it will provide information about the working body which may issue Digital Science Credential to credential owners. It will provide information about the person receiving the credential. It will be also include metadata describing educational accomplishment and outcome represented by the credential. Information about the level of the qualification that actually will be extracted from National Qualification Framework which is linked also to the European Qualification Level. It will allow the credential to be viewed in any device or medium. So the person can also view and share this credential from, for example, his or her mobile device. And it will also include an EC Digital Signature which represents actually evidence of issues by an organization or institution. So this framework will be composed by five main functions. So firstly, it will identify the individual who is going to be awarded this credential. Secondly, the institution will be able to issue a Digital Sign Credential Ordered Vocation Certificate to an individual. Both actually credentials should be issued by an awarding body. Then the individual will be able to store this digital certificate after having been issued by the institution either to his or her wallet or actually computer. And then the employer or the organization that has received this credential by the individual will be able to verify the authenticity of this digital credential. For example, if an awarding body is authorized to issue a certain qualification about a specific qualification. Last but not least, the individual will be able to share the digital certificate with an employer or other organizations and credential owners will actually have full control of what they're sharing. They will even actually be able to choose if they will share a link. And also for how long this link will be active, this link of the credential will be active when they share it actually to an employer or a training institution for further training. So at the same time, we also want to clarify that we don't actually promise a new type of learning. We actually, with this framework, what we want to offer is a standardized format for a digital certifying and a testing learning. It is spending the actual if it's source or if it comes from a formal or informal or non-formal context. We'll actually want to facilitate credential interoperability. And in any case, we're not experiment with any type of new technology or we don't want to set also a set of new rules to the member states. We're very well aware of the subsidiarity principle. We just want to have a better cooperation with other actually national existing initiatives in order to ensure compatibility among them. So last but not least, we have ESCO, which is actually the European classification of skills, compendences, occupations, and qualifications. It's an initiative of disemployment social affairs and inclusion. It's multilingual, it's available in 27 languages. Then 24 EU languages plus Icelandic, Norwegian, and Arabic. So why we need ESCO? Because nowadays national classification systems do not communicate each other. We have actually more than two million jobs that are not filled because simply education cannot really cooperate with the labor market. And because simply also, employers cannot identify the right people with the right skills. And that is actually where ESCO comes to provide a common reference language in order to enhance the cooperation between education and training providers. Here we see that ESCO has three main pillars, the occupation pillars with around 3,000 occupations, the skills, compendence, and knowledge pillar with around 14,000 skills, and the qualification pillar. These three pillars, they are interacting together. And now we are actually cooperating, doing a pilot with some member states to link the qualification, the learning outcomes from the qualification pillar to the skills pillar. And we're also, in the future, we would like to, let's explore, and the inclusion also of other types of qualifications, like international qualifications into the qualification pillar of ESCO. ESCO can be described as actually a Swiss knife, in the sense that can be used in multiple ways. What we want to ensure that it's actually the fit for the digital age, and this is why also we put information also from the digital competence framework that my colleague mentioned before. We want to inform actually students and job seekers that digital skills are very important. For the labor market. Here, after its release in 2017, has been actually used in many different projects and by different software companies for different purposes, for job matching purposes, for actually defining curricula, and so on. Yes, yes. So very quickly, ESCO will be also used in EURES for the cooperation and exchange information of CVs and job vacancies. And all member states that do not have a national classification system, will need to adopt ESCO nationally. So this was actually my short presentation. To follow our discussions in social media, please use the hashtag that you can see. And of course, if you want to contact me for any question or follow up, you also have my email in the screen, and I will be happy to respond to any question you may have. And I'm waiting for all of you for a more detailed presentation and also to answer your questions in the room A-102, with a title towards the digital labor market. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Angeliki. And just before to finish the session, let me, on behalf of Eden, let me say thank you to our keynote speakers and give them the certificate of appreciation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Enjoy the coffee break and the rest of the day. Thank you very much.