 Great, we have recording, so we can start. Hello everyone, welcome today for the Eden event. My name is Sandra Kucin, I'm Eden vice president, and I'm going to moderate this session today. Today we start with one more open education week, and I'm happy to announce that Eden is joining this very important global initiative this year as well. And as Eden is strongly supporting open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide, we have joined this initiative in order to share experience and know how in open education, from the point of foresight to policies, to open universities, to research in education, and good initiatives and practices. Today, our webinar starts with the topic education 2030, but just before we start with this session, let me share with you the other events we are going to have during this week. So tomorrow, the story of open university in Europe and the world. It will be definitely a very interesting session with people coming from open universities sharing their opinion and reflection on how should open universities work today and how much they have been changed since their start. On Wednesday, a very important topic on ongoing initiatives for open education in Europe. Please share, join this session and listen to very interesting topics and projects which are ongoing now relating to the open education. On Thursday, OER quality assessment, highly important topic prepared by our Eden app, which is discussing the issues on importance of quality assessment in open education. And on Friday, researching openness, evidence-based approach. We are talking about openness from the research perspective, how much openness contribute to the education today. So please join our vice president for research, Josef Duarte, on Friday and discuss the issue, how can research help in achieving better open education. So I'm sure that all topics are very interesting. All our webinars, as you can see, start at 1 p.m. CET in the same room. The same in the same room. So for today, I'm just going to warn you again to make you aware that all our recordings, our sessions are recorded and recordings will be available at our Eden page. And I'm very happy that we start with very important session, Education 2030, open knowledge, skills, attitudes and values in Europe and the world. As you can know, we cannot only think about past and today we have to predict the future. Today it's not very easy to predict what's going to be in future, as changes are happening quite often and quite frequently. So today I have with me distinguished speakers who will share their views and ideas on this topic. So first is Irina Volungev-Chenen, Eden president from Vitatos Magnus University in Lithuania. Then Morten Flate-Poulsen, Eden senior fellow and former Eden president, now acting secretary general from ICBE. Svetlana Knyazeva, Eden fellow and from UNESCO Information Technology in Education Institute in Moscow. Katrin Barduel from NUFIC and Paul Bacic from Matic Media, LTV and Zero Consulting. So why we have chose this topic? Recently European Commission had forum on future on e-learning in Brussels last month, but by the end of the January, trying to set priorities and see what strategic actions should be done in the next decade. Taking the part of open education, we decided today to present some of the ideas and some of the important topics, what should happen with open education in the next 10 years. So I'm happy now to give the floor to Eden president, my dear colleague Irina, who has been doing so much first as the director of Innovative Studies Institute at Vitatos Magnus University, but as a Eden president, she has achieved that Eden strongly represent and support the open education and all the issues related to the education and not only today, but the education of tomorrow. Her topic is what does it mean to be open in education, lessons learned and challenges raised. And please, Irina, share with us your views on open education. Thank you very much, Sandra, dear colleagues, very nice to see here old and new friends and people who care about the open education and work towards empowering high education institutions, learners in any level and sector of education to reach out for knowledge, for information, for new forms and formats of skill development. I will speak on behalf of Eden European Distance and D-Learning Network to provide to you quite short summary due to the limited time frames that we have here today for this panel. To look through the perspective, what Eden observes in the development of opening up education in Europe? What does it mean to open up education? And also what lessons and challenges have been recorded and can be brought forward as a summary from the perspective of Eden? So definitely one of the most significant initiatives taken in the last decade was the opening up communication by the European Commission that established the pre-conditions and supported not only the European education policy, but supported initiatives taken by organizations in initiating, explaining, training and supporting different forms of the openness in education. Open has always been in the legislation, I would say, of European Distance and D-Learning Network because we have the focus on openness since the development of the network for two decades and even more in the definition of open and distance learning. And recently we can say that European developments can be proud of the openness as a tool for quality assurance, as well as for the transparency in education. Openness became the strength of European institutions, recognizing transparent collaborative tools for networking, for collaboration, for teamwork through multidisciplinary areas and multilateral agreements of educational organizations. Open professional collaboration came on the stage, we would say, in recent decades. And it brought very interesting and innovative formats of collaboration, including virtual multilateral by mobility types of teachers and students in higher education, new learning and teaching schemes, new pedagogies, new dialectics and new types of assessment. Openness brought many challenges, but definitely we already recognize today that we have initiated to be followed with other scenarios in open pedagogies and open learning offers. Of course, research comes not always at hand, but we do our best to make good links and synergies between professionals, academics and researchers. In order to address the degrees and forms of openness, many initiatives that have been on the stage of European policy recently still need deeper investigation, what openness means for education, what are degrees and what are the forms that we recognize and that we agree upon. Recognition and certification also received specifically a new form and received new attention towards its developments when open education evolved. In the form that it needs new credentials, digital and open credentials, new descriptions of valid open and online learning formats of open and online learning environments and solutions. There's a lot to do and these are all the forms that we identify as the forms of opening up education, but at the same time, the challenges that we need to address. Open science and open access are also on the agenda of digital education action plan in Europe. Eden is a member in a working group targeted at open coordination and open consultation of stakeholders involved from all member states in the European Union, including such organizations as Eden. Delta meaning for digital education, learning, teaching and assessment. And here also we identify at least two very evidently highlighted topics for the second mandate of this working group, namely fostering transparency, quality assurance, validation and the recognition of skills and qualifications through digital, online and open learning, for formal, non-formal and informal formats. And the second one, boosting availability and quality of open and digital educational resources and pedagogies. We think everywhere in every context that we meet our colleagues and also experts and policy makers that only exchange of open educational practices, topics and peer learning might be the best tools in order to clarify and analyze and support the development incubate and experiment with the innovations in this topic. Even contributions are really numerous. The whole community behind our member organizations, and I would call future member organizations and through consortia are involved in research, experimentation and piloting of openness. But the recent references that I would like to make are of course the statement from Eden research workshop, the 10th research workshop that took place in Oak, Universidad de Berca de Catalunya in Barcelona in autumn 2018, where four statements were identified for further research that support personal guidance and support for learning. One out of four, which is statement number three as you see in the slide, refers to open education that goes beyond the production and use of OEA, but is linked to distributed a network structure of knowledge in the digital age, as well as collaborative, flexible sharing nature of social network environments as potential learning context. We celebrate Open Education Week in Europe since 2017 and organized events. And last year, in 2018, in March, we discussed the topics that were brought by our community members as highlight topics. And I identified three of them here in the slide, challenges for the quality of OEA, that you will see is linked to this year's topic as well, grassroots of open educators at work and discussion on how to promote academic integrity in online education. All of these were closely related and addressed really important specific challenges that educators and researchers and experts need when they discuss the formats of open education. European Distance Learning Week also recognizes the topic of openness among the topics that evolved during Distance Learning Week agenda. So you can see them here, a mainstream of education in Europe towards much more flexible, accessible and equitable mode. Openness is tribute to quality of teaching and learning, again repeated as the reference from my first slide, and then impact for communication. This year, we also selected, as you already saw Sandra introduced the topics that come from both button up and top down approach, where grassroots initiatives and policy initiatives need and try to identify the common language, common challenges to be solved together hand in hand through collaboration. But the new focus this year was identified, which is a strong emphasis on researching openness and evidence-based approach. So this will be the event on Friday that Sandra already introduced. Therefore, I just support that we start with today's panel introducing our key and urgent topics from thematic analysis and topic analysis on the openness in Europe, and then continue with further focus approach discussions during the week. So thank you for the opportunity to introduce Eden perspective towards researching and practicing an experimentation of openness. And I now would like to give the floor to the next panel speaker. We now thank you. Thank you very much. Maybe just before we go further as Eden president and as a scientist and the researcher, what would be your priority? What would you choose as a priority for open education in the next decade from your perspective and this broad overview you have? As a researcher, I would follow, first of all, the discussion and debate on the questions that you can see now in the slide, but research in my perspective should always be applicable. So at the same time, I would give priority for open professional collaboration of academics of teachers and students, students as well, but teachers should be prepared first in terms that we facilitate and collaborate and create together open collaborative spaces in any form, not only virtual mobility, but also other formats, peer reviewing support schemes when we can collaborate, when we can teach together, when we can share openly our practices and improve them at the same time. So these would be my priorities. Thank you, Irina. Yes, very important issue. And this is why Eden is here to support such collaboration and networking in order to share experience and know how and to collaborate. Thank you. When we talk about open education, also important issue is leadership. So now we are moving to our next speaker, Morten, who is also, as I said, former Eden president, but now acting secretary general of ICDE, International Council for Open and Distance Education. He's also CEO of Nordic Open Online Academic. And also, he has been in field of e-learning and online education for really number, number of years. So what is open leadership and mapping and tracking global initiatives? Morten, please floor is yours, share with us. Thank you, Sandra, do you hear me? Okay, thank you very much. As Sandra said, I am now working as acting secretary general of the International Council of Open and Distance Education. It is a really global organizations with 200 institutional members on all continents. And our estimates is that these institutions altogether have 15 million students. And the institutions are mainly coming from three categories. It's the traditional open universities that are really huge institutions. We have blended institutions, dual mode institutions that focus on distance education and online education. And finally, we have a number of institutions that provide services to online students and institutions. We also have an increasing number of individual members and we are open to accept more individual members. As Sandra started to say, it is really difficult to predict what is going to happen in the next decade. And it's also especially difficult if you have a global focus because there are differences between the continents. So since I just have 10 minutes as a presentation here, I have decided to focus on just three strands of thoughts. The first is the ICDE strategy that we are working after today but also have started for the next strategy period to discuss. I will also share some of the recent reports that we have been working on. And I will also talk a little bit about road maps initiatives that we have initiated to predict the future for institutions and organizations. But first of all, we are working with three-year strategies at ICDE and I have just started working with a group of people to start developing then strategies for the next three years and both in the existing strategy and in the upcoming strategy, I guess the four bullet points that you can see on this transparency is the focus trends that we have identified and are discussing. We obviously see some sort of globalization or internationalization that is an important trend for us. We obviously see that technology is still very important, open educational resources, alternative digital credentials, big data and things like that are important trends that we work with and look into. We obviously still see some important demography issues. Migration is part of that, of course. And we are also interested in the sustainability of openness who is going to pay for it. How can we make this sustainable and available for people when the funding is not there and such kind of issues? So these are important overall trends that we see and discuss at the moment. And of course, this is on a very top-level part of the strategy. But these are trends that we find important. Based on some of these strategies, we are developing and publishing on our website a number of reports that have been written by groups of people that are in our network and among our members. These are for recent and upcoming reports that kind of indicate what we think is important. We have published a report on models for online open and flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe. We have published a report on alternative digital credentials in which open batches and blockchains is part of it. We are probably next week publishing a global guidelines for ethics in learning analytics. And later this year, we will publish a report on global quality. So these are important issues that we think is important for our members today and for the future. Together with the Open Educational Consortium, we have focused on developing a roadmap toolkit for leaders and institutions and whoever would like to develop a roadmap for the future for their work. And this was introduced in our conference in Paris in December. And there were a lot of leaders in our field that worked out these roadmaps for their needs and interests. And we took this roadmap also to our recent ICD conference in Lillehammer, Norway, where 350 people from around the globe convened. And there, all speakers and participants at the conference were invited to contribute to what we call the Lillehammer Lifelong Learning Roadmap. And this is quite recent and it's still work under development. But I have chosen to share some of the draft results from that work with you. And first of all, we came up with five issues or recommendations that we as a conference talked to be of importance for governments and intergovernment organizations. The first one is that they should focus on sustainability. The second one is that they should increase incentives for lifelong learning. The third one, establish a system for cooperation with employees, public organizations and educational institutions. Four, promote regional and global partnerships. And five, focus on developing the human capabilities needed to thrive in a carbon neutral digital age. So that was some of the issues that came out of the conference and I emphasize that this is still a draft and we have invited all participants to come back with the updates on this in some sort of a Delphi technique. The second set of recommendations was towards the educational sector and public-private enterprises. They should innovate collaboratively. They should provide seamless pathways between formal and non-formal learning. They should establish financially viable, continued education. They should use technologies that are relevant and affordable for all. Five, promote accessible lifelong learning that can be applied across languages and cultures. And finally, acknowledge and recognize different accreditation systems. And the final set of statements goes toward the educators and they should ensure that learners feel that their skills and their knowledge are useful. It was recommended that they should apply distance online education with blended approaches. Three, integrate vulnerable groups as part of the lifelong process. And four, encourage learners to become self-motivated to develop their knowledge and soft skills. And five, facilitate peer-to-peer learning and interactions. And I emphasize that these are sent out to all participants at the conference. And we are now collecting feedback on these so that we will come up with a final version of this later from the conference. I should say that a lot of good people from all around the world attended and have contributed to this. And I guess that this is one chance for me also to get some feedback from you if you think these are important issues that we should take further in this process. And I guess that's what I have time to say during this very short introduction and I hope to get some feedback and questions related to this later on during the session. So thank you and we'll talk more later in the discussion. Very, very interesting presentation and I certainly like the draft you presented. Maybe as you were mentioning in your presentation, sustainability is an important issue. Just your comment, how to ensure sustainability in openness. I think it's quite a challenge, especially when we're talking about financial issues, but there are also other issues except financial. What would be your comment about sustainability to ensure sustainability in open education? Well, that is a very important, crucial question. And from my personal experience, I think that we all should focus on cost effectiveness. Because someone somewhere has to pay for services and content that we offer. Even when it's open, someone has to pay for it. And I guess that we as individuals as well as the organizations we work with and the nations we represent should focus on how to get most learning from the money. And I'm very sure that when we look around, there is a lot of money spent on education, which is probably not the best way of spending it. So I would personally encourage everyone as individuals, institutions and nations to think about how we best can spend the money we have to get as much learning from the money as we can. Thank you. I agree with you. Let's move further to our next speaker, Svetlana Knyazyva from UNESCO IET, who is going to talk about openness education that urgent needs for recognized using OER-based learning outcomes in Europe and worldwide. Definitely issue also related to the financial part regarding the financing what has been done and also to ensure that learners feel that their learning is useful. So Svetlana, what would be your presentation please. Thank you for the introduction Sandra. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. So it's a pleasure to join the webinar within this open education week and you will see that probably the issue of recognition OER-based learning outcomes is very urgent now because I didn't mention it more than mentioned it and the next presentation will be also related to this and I could see that in chat you Sandra will ask the participants what would be the most important issue and probably one of the answers is certification. So I know that many of you are advocates of open educational resources and experts in open education and experts in open educational resources. But for those participants who joined us from universities etc. I just would like to refresh the definition of open educational resources which are teaching and learning materials that reside in the public domain or are released under an open license that has no cost access, use of adaptation and redistribution with no or limited restrictions. And I will also speak about MOOCs which are not fully let's say they are conventionally free and conventionally open but still MOOCs are digital online courses accessible at special platforms. So this is already established trend and while speaking about education 2030 well it is generally recognized that OER can and shall support the sustainable development goal for ensure equal opportunity in access to education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all through its target 4.3 ensuring expanded and equitable access to all forms of basic education and training. However our recent studies while they confirmed that despite many efforts made to promote OER their use they still remain on the margins of educational systems. The horizon report 2015 postulated the preparation of OER as a key trend accelerating technology adoption in high education but the horizon report 2017 stated that well there is a problem with significant issues with access and equity so our experience and evidence proves that this is not only access and equity this is also motivation and if we wish well certainly in certain regions people need access to educational material because there is lack of paper, text, books etc. and in this region access is an issue but in other cases well open educational resources are used only as a kind of supplementary materials to existing official textbooks. So we all know the four arc of open content that were formulated in 2007 by David Wiley this is a user we offer mixed and distributed and in 2014 he revised this framework and mentioned also a very important issue related to authorship and this is retained the right to make own and control copies of the content. So I will raise the issue of the need for the six arc of open content and this is mainly maybe not for the users and reduces and uses of OER but this is rather for policy makers institutional, national etc. So this is a recognition of learning outcomes based on open educational resources. There were several projects aimed at testing the recognition of OER based learning in formal setting. For example the OER test project in 2011-2012 for four universities. In our studies future's opacity in higher education we also asked the respondents are national systems of recognition of learning outcomes and credentials prepared to accommodate the results of open education and the answer was that recognition of OER MOOC based learning results is an important aspect of incorporation of open content in the educational process. Though currently many HEI are at a very early stage of recognition of OER MOOC based learning results they have already started experimenting with micro certification, certificates, bages etc. and it is expected that within the 15 years from now the existing system of awarding credits will change and the credits for OER and MOOC would be increasingly accepted. I checked the report that Martin mentioned in his presentation and I could see there the list of 27 universities that are experimenting with this kind of recognition. They are mainly from USA, Australia, UK, several are from Latin America, Spain and Italy but still this is an emergent trend I would say. As to the studies, the European Commission is quite active in investigating the issues related to validation of non-formal MOOC based learning assessment recognition metrics going open and so these three publications are by the German Research Center based in the city and there is also the Center for the moment European Center for the Development of Vocational Training so they are also in 2016 they produced a report on the validation of open educational resources and actually I would say that the conclusions that are made by these two bodies, these two research agencies of the European Commission are very similar. So CD4 they have a formulation for OER recognition arrangements and their recommendations for validation of OER based learning include share knowledge and spread practice on the validation of OER derived learning across the formal education center, expand the options of what can be validated to include qualifications. Develop and make stakeholders aware of the options for validation of learning outcome, improve measures to link learning derived from the use of OER with other generative systems, invest in high quality assessment systems and GRC recommendations are provided the legal framework for schools and university to take the necessary steps to recognition of open educational resources and open educational practices provide the legal frameworks for open learning to be formally recognized at all levels of formal education, ministers should support digitally science, certificate, digital, academic credentials and pages exploring new ways to verify and store credentials promote the formal recognition of time spent on creating and engaging with open education activities. I fully agree with those recommendations and unfortunately I couldn't find the OER action plan produced after the second OER symposium in Congress. I didn't find mentioning of this kind of measures that I believe are absolutely necessary. So there should be arrangements both at legal, political and institutional levels that would make recognition of OER based results possible. Thank you. Svetlana very good overview of policies that are done by European Commission and they are willingness to give some recommendation to the countries, EU countries how to proceed with implementation of OER. Based on your so far overview and knowledge, what do you think how important do countries find this recommendation and do they take them seriously? Well this depends on the country because we can see that different countries are at a very different stages of promotion of open educational resources and all issues that are related to this phenomenon. I would say that first there should be a policy or strategy at the national level. Then they should go down to the institutional level but anyway any strategy or policy they don't work there are no funding mechanisms that would support these activities etc. So this should be a complex of activities at political, financial educational, pedagogical assessment etc. So this is a complex but as you see from today's presentations from the next presentation I hope you will see the same. The issue of recognition of OER based learning outcomes it becomes a very urgent issue. Thank you Svetlana, thank you. We have started talking about recognition and certification so our next topic is also talking about effective policies for recognition of new forms of online learning and with us is Katrin Bardel from NUHIC. NUHIC is Dutch organization for internationalization in education, if I have said it quite well. Thank you for joining us today. This is a project you are going to present so what are the goals and outcomes of this project? Please floor is yours. Thank you so much Tamara. Dutch organization for internationalization of education and we serve the whole education sector in the Netherlands with all kinds of activities and programs and I work as policy officer at the international recognition department and this is also the Dutch national academic recognition and information center or the NARIC center and as such as the NARIC center we coordinate a European project which is called Evaluate in which we collaborate with other European recognition centers to improve recognition of e-learning and I will give you a short presentation of our project of the Evaluate project and also of the project that came before the Evaluate project which is called Paradigms. Yeah, first of all we are getting MOOC certificates occasionally I have to say it's still the big talk of our work at the recognition department is really a recognition and assessment evaluation of degree qualifications but sometimes MOOC certificates are also included in the file so this is sporadically coming to our desk and of course we have started this project because we know that in the future there will be much more of this. So what is happening we are looking at digitization as a catalyst for flexible education it is possible now instead of doing a coherent study program for students to pick and choose their own MOOCs and collect certificates and badges to develop their own study program another way of education becoming more flexible is that MOOCs or e-learning is offered also by providers outside of formal higher education so it's not only the accredited institutions anymore that are offering education but also other like the lindad platform from LinkedIn where you can follow courses in leadership development for instance and then we see the unbending of content development assessment and certification students may be able to follow a MOOC from one institution and then be tested by another institution so those three head teaching, developing study program and assessment and certification that is traditionally done by one and the same institution can now be done by multiple actors so of course oh where's my arrow I'm sorry I'm working on two screens and sometimes yeah there it is so of course this is good because it supports lifelong learning and it is also expected to improve inclusion of groups that traditionally do not have access to higher education for instance refugees or migrants to improve their accessibility of higher education for these groups but there are also consequences for recognition because as recognition professionals we usually we are used to looking at formal qualifications and we're used to dealing with that but these like online batches and certificates are really something new that also need another perspective from recognition professionals so in order to develop common guidance and support for recognition professionals we started the new paradigms and recognition project in 2016 together with other experts from the Enigniric Networks and we published in 2018 we published a position paper, a policy paper called Oops a MOOC and this position paper we we have distinguished we started with distinguishing three scenarios for the evaluation of MOOCs so first there's MOOCs as part of a degree program for instance in the form of open education in the form of blended learning then there's possibility for students to make a collection of MOOC certificates instead of a coherent study program and the last option is to get a file that includes MOOC certificate in addition to a traditional qualification so when we get a MOOC certificate as part of a degree program for us this is not a problem in general if it is part of a accredited degree program we do not look at the separate MOOCs and if parts of it are offered or even if the whole program is offered online this should not be a problem for recognition the second one a collection of MOOCs certificate as separate modules is more problematic then you would have to establish if this collection of MOOCs or credits is comparable to a degree program and has the same depth and covers the same in terms of content is comparable to a degree program and that is very difficult to establish and it would certainly be very time intensive so for us as in merit centers that is not possible at the moment and then the third option of receiving a MOOC certificate in addition to a traditional qualification is actually what we see at the moment most of the time and is also something we can deal with in a very practical manner especially if the MOOC certificate adds learning outcomes to the traditional qualifications that may otherwise in case of deficiencies so when the traditional qualification there are deficiencies for access to the study program the MOOC may be able to resolve those deficiencies so next to these three scenarios we develop criteria for the evaluation of MOOCs so what do you actually look at what do you check when you get a MOOC certificate on your desk and these criteria are two large extent based on the criteria we use for formal education with some additional criteria included as well so first of all there's the quality of the study program there's the level of the study program the learning outcomes the workload verification of the certificate so do you know if it's authentic the way study and then that is actually also something we look at in formal qualifications and then the additional ones are the way study results are tested so has there been any testing, has there been any online proctoring how do we know that the results have actually been obtained and the seventh one is identification of the participant which is of course also very important for online learning because you have to know if the person giving the certificate is also the one who has been doing the online course whereas for formal qualifications we have the Bologna tools that we can use to certify if those criteria are met in for MOOCs or for online learning this is often much more problematic so for quality we have of course the quality assurance mechanisms if an institution is accredited then this is for recognition purposes we trust that the quality standards are okay so there's no extra check that we have to do but for e-learning for standalone for MOOCs for instance often lacking they are often not part of the quality assurance framework so then quality becomes much more problematic and we have to look at other things for instance is a MOOC accepted for admission to a study program at an accredited institution if yes that would be a quality indicator but it's much more difficult to know the same goes for a level we have the national qualification frameworks for European quality frameworks but those references are not often made on MOOC certificates and the diploma supplement is of course something available and very often used for formal qualifications to describe the learning outcomes well learning outcomes for MOOCs for online courses quite well framed and formulated but once a course is no longer there or once the content of the course changes the learning outcomes the description changes and it's difficult to know if it's still up to date or if it matches with the certificate that we have received and then the last one the workload of course the ECTS are very useful to develop within the Bologna framework to know the workload but also their higher education institutions often don't make use of ECTS when giving out a MOOC certificate for instance based on those seven criteria we started a test phase we collected some MOOC certificates and gave them to the recognition professionals to make an assessment and the outcomes of the test were that people were able to find most of the relevant information but it took them a very long time because there's no standard information available as it is in formal qualifications so it's often very difficult to look for the relevant information but they were however quite flexible in awarding green lights in accepting certificates and another outcome of the test phase was also that was already mentioned by Svetlana I think that the legal mandate does not always permit evaluation of MOOCs and online courses so from the paradigms project we had two main recommendations the first one is that it is important to balance the added value of assessing a MOOC against the time needed so sometimes a MOOC certificate is only a certificate of someone who has been watching a video for instance but sometimes it also has substantial volume and it can be relevant to take away deficiencies and to be able for a person to be admitted or to get exemptions in a formal study program so it's always important to balance that the time needed against the added value and then the second recommendation is to create more transparency on e-learning and on e-learning providers that are trustworthy and of high quality so we can do that if we can create that transparency it will also make it much easier for recognition professionals to assess certificates so after concluding the paradigms project in 2018 we started the Evaluate project which is actually where we continue with the recommendations of the paradigms project we have also invited higher education institutions to join and to bring in their perspectives and we are now focusing not only on MOOCs as we did in the previous one but it's the broader we now call it standalone e-learning so there are two main outcomes are foreseen the project will end in 2020 so we are still working on it but the first is to develop an online learning information tool which is aimed at professionals in academic recognition and gives them more information on trustworthy providers and with lots of examples of how you can look at MOOCs or e-learning certificates so it should help them to make an informed recognition decision within reasonable time limits and the second outcome is a position paper which is not aimed at the recognition professionals but it's aimed at e-learning providers so anyone at higher education institutions or elsewhere involved in development of online learning to bring in their perspective from academic recognition so what is it that you should think about if you want your course to be recognized for further study we have both the online learning tool and the position paper will be presented at the end of 2019 but I can give you some preliminary findings and the first is a recommendation to refer to widely accepted Bologna tools like the ECTS and the NQF to define learning outcomes the second is to ensure that information about course content and learning outcomes does not get lost in case of course updates or course ending for instance by using online batches where you can click on the batch to get more information or by using unique course codes and a third one is to integrate e-learning both in internal and external quality assurance mechanisms so this was in very short what we've been doing and are doing in the paradigms and evaluate projects the policy paper Upsamook you can find it on our website online if you Google Upsamook I think you will find it easily and yes I look forward to your questions and to further discussions Adrin thank you very much very interesting formal project and we are looking forward to see the results of this new one project I think maybe I was interesting to hear a little bit more about issue how to ensure more transparency in learning providers and e-learning content so can you just comment a little bit on that because I think this is a very important issue yes well what we see is especially recognition of e-learning especially when you look at the MOOCs and the short-term models it is often not the responsibility of one person at a university it is often delegated to the faculties or even to the course directors or even to the professors to see if they can admit someone on the basis of those courses or if they can give exemptions so as a result there are many many many people involved in recognition of e-learning but they are often not aware of what it actually is and how to deal with it so what we are doing in the tool is to give information about what is currently happening in the field of e-learning what are important providers how does it work how do they relate to the higher education institutions and give a lot of examples just to raise awareness and to make sure we feel more confident about how they should deal with these qualifications and now we are moving to our last presentation as you see this presentation they were ordered in this way to be prepared because each presentation is opening the topic for the new one and this transparency model can be also said that it's kind of business model so the last presentation is about business model for openness in Europe and Paul Bacic is with us he is at the moment at the Matic Media and Zero Consulting but he is also a professor of practice at the University of West India open campus and visiting professor at the University of Derby Online and lots of other roles but for the last and not least presenter we have really person who has really vast experience in education and online education so Paul please share with us your presentation and your views thank you we cannot hear you please sorry I was focusing on the slides can you hear me now good afternoon everybody it's past one o'clock in the UK we are ahead or behind I can't remember which way it is anyway let me start let me just make sure I've got control of the slides yes that's fine thank you very much for that good introduction and I'm going to pick up on a number of points that Catherine and Morton have mentioned already because I think when you have the issue of a business model for openness you need to know what openness is I think knowing what a business model is is quite subtle as well but not in fact the fundamental problem just to give you some perspective and it's kind of interesting hearing the discussion about everyone referring back to e-learning as if there were some mysteries about e-learning I'm kind of Morton seems to be in the middle of my screen particularly some of us get a little bit tired perhaps because we're at a certain age here's a bit of historical perspective on distance learning the UK Open University was founded in 1969 I think it was 30 years later that the first truly globally influential paper on quality and online learning came out the famous quality on the line paper itself derived from work by Chickering and Steven Ehrman who was a pioneer in this now that was I think 20 years ago since when obviously in the US they're very tired because there's a news item the other day plaintive meeting of university online providers, higher ed groups ask for flexibility with online learning rules now this may say something about the Americans I don't think it says anything about the current regime we've been quite depressing for a while but why is it taking so long how long do we have to wait for obvious things nothing is not new, e-cts is certainly not new what's going wrong now it's easy to blame other people but maybe we should think about blaming ourselves and that might mean the e-learning community and the open education community in particular but for those who want rapid progress like OER and Badges, part of the system you may have to wait longer, catering than you thought but I suspect you know you're going to have to wait longer than you thought, you just didn't want to say it so come on to business models the beautiful thing about business models is it's quite a vague definition it's not an Anglo-Saxon thing it's not some kind of management school thing meant to frighten people it doesn't actually in any of these definitions which are based on definitions from the Financial Times I don't think money is actually mentioned as such the last one is a bit depressing to professors for now apparently are going to be called the factors of production rather than something more uplifting but I don't think we need to go into the details of business models but one of the problems with business models is that people make a lot of gratuitous distinctions because they come from a particular lobby so someone said recently and there's probably a prize for the person who knows who said this who said there is no difference between a MOOC based degree and an online degree no it wasn't Tony Bates no it wasn't me no I don't think it was Morton because none of us went on to say let's stop pretending these companies haven't pivoted away from MOOCs so I think we have to basically reflect on some of the apparent distinctions that people make who come from particular fragments of the online learning space which probably aren't really important they're actually just confusing maybe I'll give the answer at the end if someone hasn't put it up on the text now as has been said already by more than one person courses cost money and Morton put it very eloquently normally Nordic people are supposed to be a bit reticent about mentioning money it's a kind of aimless action thing that we do but courses have to cost money and money has to come from somewhere now in Europe we're lucky there are many ways to have the European Union perhaps we'll see what happens when in England we don't have it soon or maybe not we're lucky to have governments with money some of the time so you may have an earmark grant you may have a grant from the government based on some kind of formula we may even in Europe have some foundations on the whole that's much more of an American thing and many countries are regarding students the sources of money and increasingly there aren't too many countries where fees are currently going down although bizarrely and most unlikely this may be happening in England quite soon where fees may be cut let's wait and see and of course a greater autonomy within their institutions there may well be a lot of internal business models but the problem is if you want to do a course it's going to cost something even if it's just your time because if you're a professor that's time you should, some would say be spending on research if you're not doing these vanity courses so again like a number of speakers I'm going to pose the open issue as a subset of the online issue within the EU widely and beyond the EU to nearby countries is there's not much of a business model for online because the kind of simple business model tends to rely on rich students paying high fees kind of a very attractive model obviously to the UK and the Americans and to some extent the Australians and even the Irish some of the time but it's not commonly done so I won't go into all the details because the time is short but the point to make is down the bottom of the slide the last two points are quite important this kind of simple model of get the students to pay money for your course or even a slightly less simple model of get the students to take a course which will then motivate them to pay money for the next course sell the next course by making them getting them to take the first course apart from that all other business models are marginal that doesn't mean they're not useful but it does mean if you're trying to make a business out of one particular business model then getting the money from the students is still a very attractive proposition or getting the money from the governments because you've got the students lots and lots of governments have numerous closers and quarters and caps and some countries not to be mentioned they're actually cutting the number of students they can have at the moment but let's not talk about these countries the other models again models of civic role, research, funding, grants and of course the famous sale of data model which has done Facebook very well for many years whether this is a long term model will be an interesting thing to watch so let's come on to open now luckily for me and others we spent a lot of time on this in various projects most recently in the de-transform project under Erasmus Plus I spent a lot of time personally on it for many years and advising other people and the problem is that MOOCs and OER are usually outside provider's missions and if you don't believe me, check the provider's missions check your own provider mission and as I say the Anglo model of high fees market business model doesn't work well in most member states people talk a lot about open textbooks but the actual savings are quite small and this is well documented and they also tend to require teachers to be rather more managed and controlled than teachers are comfortable with or some countries if you have a national curriculum or core curriculum or standards enforced rigidly then you can make the open textbook model work but that's not a common model in many member states and retention grades and sadly quality very sadly to some of us as a business model driver now one of my points today is that we tend I think in higher education to look too narrowly and if only we looked next door to vocational education TVET we'd find more interesting things now again I think time is short so I'm not going to dwell on what you can learn from the US and what you cannot learn from the US I'm sad to say many of my colleagues tend to learn the wrong things from the US it's particularly dangerous to take any deductions from Silicon Valley it is a very weird place with extremely high priced houses and a very mad kind of approach to life and values so I really wouldn't I wouldn't take too much care with learning from them there are a number of structural issues in California which make it very different from other other states in the US and from our member states but looking down the bottom of the slide there are things that we should pay attention to and on the whole in Europe sadly we don't close integration of the vocational sector with the HE sector I didn't mention I should have done the uniform quality funding regime general importance to vocational skills and systematized easy credit transfer not waving your arms helplessly and saying isn't ECTS wonderful and haven't we done well in Bologna yes we have but we really only started but we really only started and that's one of the issues so just to kind of make sure I've upset most people I'll just mention that unlike unlike many people in the states competencies and outcomes are not actually new if they seem new to you then maybe you should read a few more books they're new in some jurisdictions and they're new if you focus purely on higher education because I've heard this phrase oh well that's the kind of thing they do in TVET PS so or not bother about that but luckily many of the techniques developed in TVET can be applied in HE also and the point that Catherine made accreditation of prior learning really needs its own business model and the honest answer is if the student's not too valuable to the institution or if the process of giving accreditation is lengthy the institution will feel incredibly tired and the easy, the default answer is no in many institutions so you have to we have to make APL automatized now this bottom is a sideswipe really to the US because you know micro masters which I think people think is new well I first heard the phrase modular masters in 1996 which was quite a long time ago and probably it wasn't new then but the ECTS permits and Bologna permits tiny numbers of credits if you don't see them that's because we in the universities haven't given them to you we could now again there are many critiques of Bologna so if you want to read about that look up the phrase Bayonet Bologna and you'll see see what's going on now this is an example of hopefully a very respectable course at TVET level 4 school and sort of very early in university in the vocational space you don't need to read this but basically it has learning outcomes it has assessment criteria has suggested assessment methods I could have written this 10 years ago and had it accredited in the UK and in several other countries but not all and in fact not many this kind of outcomes assessment model is very standard and used right through the vocational sector and for tiny this whole course is 10 is 5 ECTS 10 vocational credits so quite a small course and each unit of the course separately accessible is one vocational credit 0.5 in ECTS the vocational sector does not have a problem with this kind of thing so why is higher education making life so difficult for itself maybe if it got a grip on this we'd have a much more valuable business model so what to do and by whom now it's lovely to write recommendations and I was kind of looking over some of our colleagues recommendations and I think probably I first saw some of these in the lifelong learning reports of the 1990s and the trouble is that governments are very slow to react and there's a good report slightly depressing report written by myself and many colleagues funded by JRC called Policies for Open Education in Europe a survey of 28 member states and there are some shiny examples of member states who have got the message about open education and then the rest haven't and the trouble is we widened the brief to make sure we looked at online learning as well it really didn't help and it really didn't help to look at distance learning because as some of the accreditors know a number of member states are really quite, you know careful about distance learning that's a kind of polite way of putting it but let's look at some recommendations we need to take some kind of systems in financial viewpoint we need to take the institutions as they are not as we want them to be and some of the recommendations have big downsides now I think I've probably said enough about things now another one I think is very relevant is let's look outside the box let's look to the box next door for schools something that professors find incredibly difficult believing that there would be something in high schools they could learn from but there's a lot they can learn from for example it does help to have trained teachers rather than untrained professors and so training teachers is absolutely important however much we do, we won't do enough we'll have to do it forever we might as well get on with it and I think that could be key because long term that's probably one of the best ways and on that note I'll leave the credit to a little dilemma what is scared level is you're a MOOC mummy because that's the box that's normally not filled in on the forum as Catherine has already mentioned so on that thought that's all from me yeah good point one of the MOOCs why does it take some change why does it take some change I would say that outside I would say that changes quite faster than we and I've been participating in some European Commission policy discussions and I wouldn't tackle quite issue why what is issue why does it take so long for Europe to make some changes I think just quickly it's probably because it's Europe and this is one of the strengths is one of the weaknesses but I think also we tend to make a development we say well we've done that and then we just solve this and relax and instead of saying well that was a good start why don't we do more somehow we kind of just relax so for example the issue is about ECTS and study hours there's a lot of excellent research suggesting the link between that and actual study hours is pretty vague to say the least but we tend just to bury these reports I think the other thing is and it's well known among Commission officials the vocational side the vocational equivalent of Bologna has really not done at all well and you get people to admit that privately and I don't understand the reason for that I think it probably says something about the variety of vocational schemes and I don't know what to do with that again I would say look outside why is it that across the world the typical consultants advising UNESCO for example on TVET probably comes from Australia and if they don't come from Australia they come from New Zealand they don't come from Europe they don't come from the US or Canada because they don't actually even understand the concepts there especially in Canada so there's actually a mismatch between the OER world and the TVET world because TVET in Canada is fully devolved to institutions and that gives you nothing really to grasp on so I think before we had to think smaller let's transform our institution or our country and maybe transforming Europe because it does seem to take far too long I agree we would like to make sure that we are doing right before making another step and very very carefully we are doing that sometimes we have to jump and to be a little bit not so careful in order to achieve something but as we are coming to the end of our session there are some questions in the chat so please look at them and if you can type the answers for the end I would like to ask briefly from each of you in one sentence what would be your next step for Europe raising issue on OER and open education what should be the next step in that way so from Irina looking from the point of Eden what should be Eden's next step in approaching and recognizing and making more aware OER I still keep to my position that we should work with the teachers who create learning experiences for a student in order that the search find, integrate open educational resources and practices in education collaboratively and then identify challenges that are put on the research agenda Thank you Irina Martin if you look from perspective of ICVE at the moment as secretary general what is ICVE next move in relation to OER obviously we do work a lot with open educational research resources and promote that from my personal perspective I think that we now with the technology we have can develop and distribute a lot of good open educational resources what is challenges is to have good people good teachers to support and moderate and train and teach the individuals out there and very often it is far too much one to one communication between one student and one teacher and what I would like to see is more cost effective models on how we can use the teachers work more efficiently so that we can reach out to more people with the limited number of teachers we have. Thank you very good point Svetlana from Dionesco ITE perspective what should be the challenges and next steps for OER Currently me and my colleagues we are working in two directions one is indicators for OER impact and another one is completely different and this is open educational resources and artificial intelligence this week is also the mobile learning week in Paris but you would ask my personal opinion I would say that during this year that I have been dealing with open educational resources I have been thinking that there is a community of OER experts and there is a whole world of people who are unaware completely about open educational resources and well my idea would be how can OER experts go beyond the OER community so that the OER would have real impact on everyday education Thank you very much Katrin from your perspective of projects that you have been doing and now you are planning are you thinking that this project that you are doing at the moment is just the right one at the moment for this direction you have to open the mic you have noted the mic I think it is important to create more recognition I can hear myself yes it is important to create more awareness about recognition first of all for the recognition professionals develop guidance and support so that they know how to deal with these OER and recognition of OER but also for providers of OER to take along the perspective from recognition and what is needed if you want your course to be recognized Sorry for my voice and for my sneezing I hope I will manage to to the end and Paul the last issue what is going to do UK going to do the EU how they will have an education I think I find it very difficult to speak for the UK especially at the moment but what I and some colleagues would like to do is teach all the teachers in Europe to use open educational resources properly but to do this in an accredited way and let's have a go at accrediting such a course which will be far smaller than the masters don't do that a smallish tight course 10 ECTS at most and let's have it accredited across Europe as a qualification now we may have to work country by country but if we start the process maybe we can finish it if we never start we won't finish and as I say we can provide some input on that I think we just got to start it but it has to be accredited because otherwise people won't take it seriously so that's my recommendation thank you thank you in development and in promotion after it's developed so that all of us can actually see that there is a good example how to do things so I would like to thank all of you in time today to all my speakers for being here and presenting their views and opinions definitely we are coming from different parts of Europe and also outside the Europe I've been looking at our participants they have been coming from all over the world so it does only confirm that education is a global issue and it covers every country and that the issue of open education is quite long present but still very important topic and I would say that the most important in this process are people if we have educated and trained people who will know how to find open educational resources who will know how to share these resources how to reuse them as well how to communicate and share their experience on and move further so I think that we all agree that trained teachers trained educators are very important so thank you again for participating let me just remind you that tomorrow we start again at one city from on topic of open universities and also just to correct myself on Thursday the topic of OE quality assessment is done together with NAP in the NAP and a special interest group on technology enhanced learning and at the end I don't have my slide but I invite all of you to join us in Bruges in June for even an annual conference there will be definitely again this topic who will be who is still very much present and important but we'll also talk about other issues so join be part of our community and if not during this week let be present together all in Bruges in June thank you very much all, bye