 Webinar, we have on promoting open online learning in the workforce in Europe, a very, very interesting initiative by EASMA from the European Commission, and the project leader, project manager for that initiative was Dr. Christina Davudeda from Price Waterhouse, CUPUS, EU Services. We will have one hour to discuss this initiative and to raise some questions and reflections from the presentation. I am Ebor Sjanilsson, I am the EDEN EC and also the chair of the EDEN Special Interest Group of Technology and Naval Learning and Quality Enhancement and also in EDEN NAP and in EDEN Council of Fellows. So it's a great pleasure to have you all here and it's a great pleasure to organize this webinar on behalf of EDEN. As I said when we were talking before starting, the webinar is recording. You who are here and have registered, you will get an email about the link and you will also get a badge for your participation. During the webinar, Christina will share the findings about this initiative and feel free to raise reflections, questions, etc. in the chat. I will myself try to catch up with that so we can have in the end of the webinar maybe some 10 to 15 minutes to discuss your ideas and your experiences. So please feel free to write whatever in the chat. I think I have said everything. Well, one more thing, those webinars are always followed up by an EDEN chat later in the evening at 6 o'clock PM, central European time. So we will have an EDEN chat. It is with Twitter and the hashtag was also in the email you got for this webinar. So at that chat you have the possibilities to discuss further on and I will be there to moderate that session. Okay, thank you very much. I see that there is a lot of echo from my microphone. Is it better now? So before I leave the floor to Christina, I will say something about EDEN. Yes, here you can see the presenters. And as it was announced in the call for this webinar, it was also under Richard from the European Commission and EASMA who also are involved in this project, but he had a very late council because he had to substitute his director just today and just this time. So I asked Christina to take his part as well about the background. So EDEN is the largest active and developing professional community of researchers and practitioners of the open distance and e-learning in Europe. We are an unprofit and non-governmental association and it was established in 1991. It's a platform for professional cooperation and information exchange. It's open for all levels and sectors of education and training. It's open for institutions, individuals and networks. And we have our legal office in the UK and the secretariat is in Hungary since 1997. The mission of EDEN is to support and divorce to modernize education in Europe, to network and collaborate, facilitate knowledge and practice exchange, improve understanding amongst professionals in distance and e-learning, and promote policy and practices across the area, online learning and e-learning and distance learning. Our members are both from institutions. You can be an individual member, it can be networks. We have some 187 institutional members and some over 1,000 members in the network of academic professionals, which is a meeting and communication forum. And we have over 30 European or national networks presented in membership. We have 400 plus institutions represented from 70 countries, both within Europe but also from outside Europe. As I said, one of the special interest groups EDEN has since I'm here, is the EDEN Special Interest Group on Teaching, Enabling Learning and Quality Enhancement. And I myself share of that interest group. And we are some 10 people, colleagues actively in the core group and then people who have an interest in this area will come to join. So this webinar is on behalf of this special interest group. And the webinar is also in collaboration with the EDEN Network of Academic Professionals, which also is a special network which you are free to contribute with. And they have a special members area like this webpage where people can find colleagues, find projects, find collaborators, etc. And they have also an own steering committee. We are hosting annual conferences each year. The conference in 2020 will be held in Romania, Tymysuara. And the topic is about human and artificial intelligence for the society of the future. It will be 21 to 24 June. So welcome to register for that. The call is also open for contributions. So with that, a brief information about EDEN. As I said, there's a cooperation with EDEN SIG and EDEN NAP and of course with EDEN as a sole. So with that, I will give the floor to Dr. Kristina Devojeda from Pies Waterhouse Coopers, EU Services, to present about the initiative and the findings and the recommendations. And I will also say that EDEN was a partner in this project. So it is a great opportunity to have you here, Kristina. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Evel, for your introduction. And thank you very much for this opportunity to be here and to share the findings and the outcomes and to have this discussion with the audience. And the audience that we have today is a target audience of this initiative. I really hope that there are no any issues with sound. So if there is anything, just let me know. But I'll try and do my best for you to be able to hear me. And please let me start with just a brief introduction of myself, who I am. So I'm leading PWC Innovation Research Center in the Netherlands and working for PWC EU Services. We are doing all kinds of assignments for the European Commission and IASMA, already for more than 12 years from my side. And it's mainly in the area of skills, upscaling, rescaling, talent, emerging technologies and skills. So all the new and alternative forms of education and training, artificial intelligence and all the related topics. And in the context of my work, we've carried out lots of different related studies for the European Commission, one of which will be discussed today. And this is this initiative on promoting online training opportunities that was to a year initiative, which was just finished in the autumn of 2019. And we are actually now actively disseminating the outcomes of this initiative. And the objective of our webinar today is to first, for me to introduce to you the key objectives, outcomes and key results of this initiative. And then specifically to present the key elements of the vision, because that was actually the main target of the initiative, to develop this common vision based on inputs from all key stakeholder groups on how do we make sure that online training is actively promoted among the workforce in Europe. But for me, the most important point of the webinar of today is actually to discuss with you how can we make sure that the vision is not just staying in the report as it is right now, but is actually transcended into the real life reality, into your own local context. And that together we discuss how do we maximize the impact of those outcomes of the initiative. So in the end, we would like to have this kind of interactive discussion together with you. So please let me just start with a brief introduction of background and objectives of the initiative. And so we were asked by the European Commission, specifically AASMA and DIGI Grow, to identify the ways to massively promote online training solutions among companies in Europe, and specifically among small businesses in Europe. And how to find this out? We were asked to do extensive desk research. We conducted lots of in-depth interviews to Pan-European online surveys. We had multiple expert workshops and our final conference in Brussels in June. And the key outcomes have been formulated in the final report and the brochure, which are all already accessible online. So you're all warmly welcome to explore them on the EU Publications website. And the link is provided. These are especially defining report is quite a long document. The brochure is more kind of an appetizer, gives you the main highlights of the outcomes. And today I'll try to guide you through them briefly. So let's start with why this topic and why now. I will not surprise you by saying that we leave in wonderful times, times of great change, driven not only by all those disruptive technologies like AI, robotics, big data, Internet of Things, and so on. But we also experience lots of social challenges, societal challenges, economic challenges, political challenges, which should also not be forgotten. Things related to migration, ethical diversity, gender equality, social inclusion, and so on. All those developments inevitably have fundamental implications for skill requirements. And that implies that companies need to work on upskilling and reskilling of the people working there. So we need a new mindset. We need also companies and the company leaders to accept this reality that if you do not invest in upskilling or reskilling, then you are out of the market very soon. So it's just a matter of time. And this time is running out very quickly. So there is a need for new effective approaches to develop the required skills. And this is a quote in the center here, which I really liked it, so from Eden and from our SATA conference that we had in September that it's not about technology. It's about people. We often talked about it during our workshops that technology is not the key factor here. Technology is more like a tool. And it's more about how we will be using this technology, what we will be doing with that, and what implications it will have on us people. And that will determine how the future will look like. And now if we zoom into the world of S&E, it's a small company, small businesses, according to the European Commission's definition. So under 250 employees, then their world, when we talk about this reskilling and upskilling challenge, is even more challenging because they have, as well, this ever-growing need for upskilling their employees. But they are operating under extreme time pressure, extreme budget constraints. They have fierce competition for talent. And often they also have this fear to invest in their people because of a high retention rate and lots of people actually moving quickly from one place to another. And next to all that, we have factors like frustration and ignorance from the company's side, with frustration being represented by the fact that we talk with lots of representatives of small companies, and they say, we would love to do something about that in terms of upskilling and reskilling, but we have no idea literally where to go. It's an ocean of opportunities, lots of different platforms, tools, trainings. Where should we go? What should we do? How should we organize it? There is on the other side another group of small companies we talk to, which demonstrate a huge level of ignorance, which usually these are not high-tech companies, but more traditional sectors, which say, yeah, we're doing this business like this for decades already, and it's gonna be fine. We don't need to bother, and all those digital things, we really do not care, and our business seems to be perfectly okay. Well, it's a big question to what extent this is a sustainable perspective. On the other hand, when we talk about all these upskilling and reskilling challenges, we have such a wonderful thing as online training, and of course, I don't have to tell you about all the benefits that it brings, like flexibility, cost effectiveness, learner engagement, innovative pedagogies, better reach, scalability, and so on. And I have to emphasize here, we do not try to proclaim online training as the only way of organizing learning in this digital age, but it's a promising and highly relevant kind of solution that we should definitely consider, and which companies should be aware about when they deal with these reskilling and upskilling challenges. And I also wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page when we talk about online training. What do I actually mean by that? So here, we've put the definition that we used in our study, and in its essence, it's literally, it's basically, we talk about training that is delivered, enabled, or mediated using digital technology for the explicit purpose of learning on organizations. Actually, you could say that we're talking here about digital learning. So we're not talking explicitly about training, it's learning more, general approach, and online, yeah, can be also offline if it's digital, we're talking here about digital learning, but even further than that, and here in Purple, we've highlighted this kind of a mindset shift that we wanted to emphasize throughout the report, that we actually need to shift from digital learning idea to what's the idea of learning in a digital world. And let me explain what I mean by that. When we talk about digital learning, we kind of say, well, you can learn in all different ways, but you can actually use digital tools and we can digitalize the way we learn. So let's put it like digital learning, so that's the term. Learning in a digital world actually emphasizes that the world itself is becoming so digital that it's almost impossible to distinguish anymore between digital and non-digital learning, and it doesn't make a lot of sense so that because learning itself becomes part of this digital world, so let's just talk about learning in a digital world. That's the difference. But despite all those great challenges and promises that online training offers to small companies, a reality shows that the adoption rates of online training solutions by European companies, and especially we're talking now about small companies, happens at an unacceptably slow rates, which was the problem that was actually found by the European Commission and was the very reason why this study was launched. And why do we say that the adoption rates are unacceptably low? Well, here is the graph that we developed based on data from PIAC database on the participation rates in open or distance education in SMEs in different countries and in red you see or in dark orange you see companies who responded yes and then yellow no. So there is a still relatively low proportion of companies. By the way, we have also made a split between different sizes within SMEs. So starting from less than 10 people and then up to 50 and 250. But you can see that the rates are quite low here and some countries that are popping up are Spain, Finland, Sweden, Poland, so Lithuania, so these are examples. But for the rest in most countries it's really slow and even in those countries where it's higher than in others it's still not very high. I have to say that the data we are showing here is already quite outdated. And it's a big challenge for us as researchers to work with such analysis and or databases because the time lag from the moment when you get this data till the moment that you can actually analyze this data is an extreme gap. For example, here we were doing this analysis in 2019 and the data we had to work with from these countries was from 2012 to 2015. So you see the difference in some countries almost seven years of difference of measuring moments which is quite insane and certainly does not reflect the current situation. But let's hope that these databases showing this type of data will be moving more and more towards real life data reflections in the future which will allow us researchers also to work with the most actual data. Nevertheless, we talk to companies in terms of checking whether this is a realistic picture of this type of data and they pretty much confirm that the situation has not drastically changed since that moment. So our study was still needed. And before you can solve something you need to understand why it is like this. So our first step was actually we needed to figure out what was the key reason? Why are the adoption rates of those digital learning or online training solutions in small companies was so low which we did by means of in-depth interviews and online surveys and across Europe. And here you can see a list of all kinds of reasons and barriers so it's not like only one thing why the adoption rates are so low but if we have to prioritize we could still clearly see that the most popular reason why was this lack of the overall culture of learning in companies. So learning was not in many companies is still not a major part of the agenda. It's not considered to be something to be treating in a formal way. Many companies they do learn it's not like they completely ignore it but it's not seen as something special or something which needs to be formalized be a kind of part of company's culture. It's just yeah, we do learning sometimes and that's it but we never bother whether it's like a strategic choice or not we just do it whenever we need it and then we forget about you know some kind of more flexible attitude but not an established kind of this culture where it's inspired or encouraged or where people inspire each other where leaders support it where people get to recognize for it or where there are some specific tools, approaches or things like that which would form a more kind of a culture there. But of course there were also other reasons which we needed to take a look at and in any case this pre-analysis supported our initial hypothesis that something needs to be done about it. And we were asked by the commission to explore what exactly needs to be done and by whom but also how should the funding be organized and how should online training complement other traditional forms of training that's what I tried to emphasize from the beginning that we should not promote it as the only way of doing training in the new world, right? Because there are still also promising areas where physical training is needed but also where learning on the job, real-time learning is needed and so on. And what are the most promising ways of reaching out to the workforce to engage them into online training? And that's where I would like also to mention what André Richet, so I have kindly mentioned Mr. André Richet, he's coordinating this initiative from DigiGrow of the European Commission. So what he asked me also to convey during this webinar that this online training initiative forms part of a series of initiatives under the strategic initiative of the European Commission. Skills for industry and there are some other parallel initiatives that look for example at curricular guidelines for engineers of the future including also online training measures or a new funding mechanisms explicitly for stimulating up-skilling and reskilling initiatives or the overall EU skills strategy for 2030. All those initiatives that are carried out by the European Commission, they aim to generate input for the new commission. So because they were launched by the old commission and now they are all delivering inputs for the new commission to take over and to develop these new programs for the future based on stakeholder inputs. And the key way for us to gather answers to these questions was to go to people, to the field, to users, to providers, providers of education and training, to policy makers themselves, to supporting structures, networks, communities and associations and to ask them to provide their views, vision, ideas, suggestions to those questions that we had to answer. So it wasn't our own opinion, but it was a consolidation of lots of consultations with people from the field, from across Europe. All right, so I'm now moving on to the key outcomes. And I already mentioned to you that the report is itself already available on the EU Publications website. And during this webinar, I would like to only to focus on the very last point of this report, which is vision and top priority measures and overall recommendations. But you see that there is a whole list of other bullet points which were covered in the reports quite extensively. So if you're interested in those, you're warmly welcome to explore the reporting. If we have to summarize the key outcomes first, it's just to say that so far, when we talk about specific measures, initiatives and so on of what needs to be done. So now we're already in the area of solutions. We were talking about challenges. Now we're moving already to solutions that we found. And so, so far before we did this study, the initiatives measures programs that were aiming to change the situation, they were mainly supply oriented very often. So they tried to make online training more attractive, to make supply bigger, better to develop new platforms, to support developers of online training solutions and so on. While during this research, we concluded that there's actually a need also, not also but actually for a shift from a supply oriented approach towards a demand oriented initiatives, which implies that we need to put our users in the center because that could be also the very answer to the problem why the adoption rates are so low. So we need to make sure that our users are putting the center of the situation that the training solutions are developed for them, with them and are relevant to what they are doing and tailored to their very context in which they are operating. And that actually relates to all the specific conditions for a massive take up of online training that we talk about the user in the center and of course that the providers, the supply of online training is extremely important and it is extremely important to have high quality and good providers, but it should be more structured around the user rather than around the supplier. So now we are entering the vision itself. The objective for us was to develop an overall blueprint of what kind of measures, roles, priorities would be needed at the EU and national levels in 2021, 2027 and beyond. So actually who has to do what to make sure that the online training solutions are successfully adopted massively within Europe and especially by small companies. So that's what we did. And what I meant shouldn't already that we had to do this based on inputs from all kinds of stakeholders. I will recall them again. So these are users themselves, providers of training solutions themselves. So education and training providers, policymakers, supporting structures. So all kinds of industry associations, cluster organizations and so on and similar structures. So it's a huge kind of community that we had to mobilize and whom we asked through online surveys, interviews and workshops to submit their inputs. And it was our task to make sure that we translate this waterfall of suggestions, of course put it through the assessment framework and develop top priorities. And I can tell you this was a highly challenging exercise because we actually received a waterfall of ideas. I mean it. So it was just an immense amount of all kinds of views, visions, solutions, ideas at all kinds of levels and it all demanded a structure. And we wanted to have a structure which has a holistic approach that we do not tackle only one piece of a bigger picture and just that's it. Or that we do not have fragments of a bigger picture but do not see the whole picture. So we desperately needed a framework where we would be able to put all those collected measures. And we decided to work with two dimensions. And the first dimension was this framework which is called a habit loop model. And please let me briefly explain to you what I mean here because it's a fundamental for understanding how the next steps were structured and how the vision looks like. Why we chose the habit loop model. The habit loop model basically shows you what needs to be done to change somebody's habit or somebody's behavior. We took it from, it was kindly suggested by Qt Solutions. It's a company in Brussels which is professionally changing behaviors of companies. What are we talking about exactly that? You may remember that I mentioned to you that the biggest barrier that we found for adopting online training solutions was this lack of learning culture. So there was a need and there is a need for many companies to change their behavior, their attitude towards learning and their behavior. So this model seemed to be perfectly suitable for that. And the model shows that you first need to have a motor before you can start the, get it running, so to say. And the motor here is the knowledge of the fact that so there are online training solutions that they do exist and that they can be relevant and useful for my company. That's the motor here. The trigger is something operational, like a reason that you need to have to start engaging in online training. Very many people tend to think that, well, it's enough with the motor. If you know that online training solutions exist and that they're very good, that the company will be using that. Of course we see that it's absolutely not the case because to start using something you need a good reason for that. And that's your trigger. The trigger is actually when you work on a project in a small company, for example, in this case, and you consider, and you see there is a challenge and you understand I need to follow a certain training, an online training in this case, to solve that problem. And if I don't do this, I most probably will not be able to solve it or it will be more problematic and I'm not sure. So that could be a good solution for me if I follow an online training. So you get an immediate trigger to start doing that. And if you have the trigger, then you can move to routine. Routine is the actual process, how it's all organized, including the tools, technologies and the solution itself, the online training itself. And then it's not enough. Again, I heard from many people as if they think that just following the training is the ultimate objective. But of course we should not forget that we are not following these trainings just because of doing learning for the sake of learning. We want to probably apply it somewhere. Otherwise it does not have a lot of sense at least to me. And probably difficult also for SMEs to convince them themselves to do this if there is no practical implementation. So this is the reinforcement point where you apply training to practice and as a company you actually make sure that this is relevant and is applied. Otherwise what's the point, right? And environment, that's the fifth one. So it has to be sustained. It has to be a sustained process. When there is this culture, when people do this, not on an ad hoc basis, but it's kind of a part of your normal behavior in companies and everybody's aware, everybody's engaged in learning, people exchange their experiences, they help each other, they discuss it with each other and the leadership is supporting this and so on. So these are the five elements and only when you have all five of them present will the behavior have a chance to be changed. If something is missing, it's probably not gonna be a big success from the very beginning, it's already quite clear. So we took that model to structure the measures that we were collecting from stakeholders, but that was only one part of the approach and we liked it a lot because it's a cyclical, holistic approach showing that organizing learning is much more than just the third element, routine, which is usually related to just tools, technologies and learning solutions themselves. So now if we go further, I also have to emphasize that of course, we're talking now about small companies as if it's one homogenous population of companies but it's not the case. As we all know, SMEs are so different in terms of size, sector, age, culture, like even high-tech SMEs are different. If you take ICT related SMEs, they are in a totally different world, you don't have to convince them about online training. Most probably they have been using it for a decade already at least. But if we talk about other high-tech SMEs, not ICT related, then it's already less popular and if we go to more traditional sectors then it's less and less popular. So we have to keep this all in mind when we develop a vision and that's why it has to be multi-dimensional because what we also found when we have to develop solutions, we need to understand that there are lots of actors involved in the process so we cannot delegate all the solutions to SMEs themselves or to the European Commission or to the suppliers of education and training solutions. So it has to be a complex approach where lots of different actors have a certain role to play. And that brings us finally to the picture of how we structured the vision in four strands which is kind of summarizing the whole idea behind the approach and that's what I would like to explain to you in detail. You can see here two axes. One is related to the target group, horizontal one employers and employees and another one motivation intrinsic and extrinsic. And in our research we found that actually of course both need to be targeted employers and employees. If you work exclusively with employees that do not get leadership support then employees will not get enough support and opportunities to use online training solutions at work. If you work exclusively with employers then obviously you're missing out the end user, the employees who need to be retrained and in terms of motivations, we had lots of discussions whether we have to focus on intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. I hope we all are on the same page just to clarify. So by intrinsic we mean motivation when people are doing something because it's their own wish, their own desire because they have some internal personal satisfaction after doing that like personal growth because they want really to excel in certain skills and extrinsic is related to external rewards. So people are doing something because they will be rewarded for that. And our research has shown that we need both approaches. Both can be good and sometimes combined and there is no one best way to do things. So that's why we actually split all the measures that we collected from different stakeholders into four strands and we assigned them a certain color. And our first color was blue which refers to this visionary leadership and it covers employers with intrinsic motivation and refers to all the measures that aim to inspire employers, to encourage them to promote online training among their employees and to facilitate those processes and help them exchange experiences, set up all those processes and so on. If we go below that, so yellow strand refers to the same target group employers but there we will find measures that aim to reward employers for stimulating online training within their companies and we talk here about tax measures, labels, SME awards. Then we have a green strand and that is focusing on intrinsic motivation of employees which is the most natural way of learning that we have here. It's where people genuinely just want to learn something because they like it, because they want to grow in something because it's needed for them. So that's this green strand and they need to be inspired and facilitated. And then there is this red strand where measures aim at rewarding learners for engaging in learning activities. We even have seen suggestions to use monetary rewards, non-monetary recognition and so on. We can discuss a lot about which one is good, which one is bad and we had lots of quite hot discussions on that with an overall conclusion that we cannot claim that something is better than the other because they are meant for different target audiences, these types of measures and in some cases one measure, one strand is better in other cases, it may not be working and so on. Sometimes they could be combined. These, we are still not at the level of specific measures. This is just an overview of dimensions just to show you how we structured the vision. So you may remember the cycle that I showed you back here. So this cycle of the behavioral change and now this picture with four colors. So these are our four, these are two frameworks that we use to structure the measures. And why we had to use frameworks because now I will be showing you, please don't try to read this, it's not meant for you to be reading this, it's just, but it's all available in the report. So it's all openly available. It's just to show you, so I will be clicking through it quickly that we have, in total, it's something around 50 different measures which were prioritized out of hundreds of solutions which we had to combine, assess, re-assess, merge together and then derive these about 50 measures. So we could not have a list of just 50 measures and say, oh, this is just huge list and that's what you have to do. We needed to set priorities and we needed to understand do we have a full picture or not. So putting it into these dimensions, so in purple, you will see here, this is the framework. So if you see on the left side of the table, we have motor and then there will be trigger routine and so on. So these are measures structured around the cycle, the habit loop. And on the right side, you will see the colors and these are the colors of the vision strands. You may remember that we just discussed it. So what we had to do, we had to link each specific measure with a certain point on a cycle of the habit loop model and a certain vision strand. And in some cases, one measure was related to different strands simultaneously. So it could happen as well. And here you can see that in total, we had a similar number of measures for different vision types or different strands. But in terms of priorities, how did we define the top priorities? We had a European stakeholder survey again. And we asked the stakeholders, which I already mentioned to you, all those key groups to nominate their top priorities. And here I will show them to you later on. I just wanted to illustrate that the strand that gathered the highest number was the blue strand. And that's, you may remember, it's a visionary leadership when leaders of small companies are tackled, are targeted and are inspired, encouraged, facilitated to exchange experiences. And if you move down to the next point, it's, so the second place, so to say, it goes to the green strand, which refers to learners in the driver's seat. And you remember this, the most natural way of learning when learners themselves are just genuinely engaged in learning process because they want it for themselves. And yellow and red received less priorities, but still they are included in the priority list. So actually this priority check showed us that all four vision strands need to be included in the common vision. So they are all valid. Some of them are more relevant to some context than others, but we should not exclude any of them and say that they are not or are wrong, which we had as a question during our debates. And now if we look at the top priority measures, so here they are, you will see them in the brochure, you will find them in the reports. We will not have time to go into each of them in detail, but you can just briefly look at them. So it's basically specific elements need to be present. Related to different aspects of what we've covered, related to establishing communities of practice, but also developing multi-stakehold collaboration platforms, things related to personalization, like developing platforms with personal learning accounts, personal learning environments, but also, for example, things related to recognitions, to learning reviews as part of management reviews and providing spaces for experimentation and innovation. So that was one of the key points that we need at the EU level and national levels. We need some hubs, some spaces where we could try out new approaches because very often with these digital technologies with radical changes, you do not know what will work and what will not work and you have to experiment. You have to take risks. You have to try out things before knowing whether it will be working. And it has to be some kind of this environment which is available to both suppliers, providers of online training, but also for them to engage users and also for users to try out things. So this type of initiatives. Each of those blocks which you see here is connected to specific suggestions, proposals for projects at the EU and national levels. So we did not stop at just saying, okay, you have to establish communities of practice. Okay, well, you all may agree, but what needs to be done and who has to do it and what kind of projects and how, so what we did for each of those measures for these top priority measures, we developed quite specific tables and I will show just an example to you. So here, they are all available again in the final report where we also describe so what kind of activities could require dedicated budget. These are examples of activities, of course. The list is not exhaustive, but we show here that it's, for example, a pan-European initiative that needs to be introduced with a specific budget, with a certain duration and what could be the scope of that, then what kind of regional national funds would be needed and so on. So we did it actually for all of those measures and that's the most important input that we were trying to deliver to the new commission, which I mentioned in the beginning, because the objective was to make sure that we informed them based on the market needs of what the priorities of the new commission should be directed at next, so the upcoming period, 2021-27 and to give them some food for thought but also specific suggestions and specific initiatives to consider in the future. And all those initiatives and suggestions, again, were developed based on the inputs collected from the stakeholders. And just some final remarks from my side. So to conclude, what our research suggests is that there is a need for learning ecosystems. I think that's a topic that is popping up during pretty much most of the discussions when you talk about the promotion of online training. It's a complex phenomenon, complex idea that we're talking about and we cannot deal with it at the level of an individual organization or even the country. It's very often there is a need for joining forces at the level of multiple organizations, countries and creating these ecosystems which all key players are included and a central role is assigned to learners themselves as I already emphasized. And of course, personalization. We had this discussion again between personal and personalized which let's not enter it. So personal learning solutions are crucial and need to be also part of the whole approach and I put at the cornerstone. Then the support that needs to be provided to learners needs to be not an ad hoc basis but has to be present during the whole professional career. Yes, so everything should be oriented towards this notion of life. All right, so that's it from my side for the presentation part. Thank you so much for your attention and I'll give the floor back to Eba, I guess for moderating the question and answer session. Yes, thank you so much, Christina. It was a really, really fantastic presentation. I have myself followed this project as an evaluator and expert for the whole period of time. So we have had many discussions and I think this project initiative is extremely useful for the workforce in Europe. So that's why we also wanted to have it as a webinar because we have to, it has been disseminated and all of us need to do our part what you are suggesting from this initiative. So there are a couple of questions in the chat. For example, one from, you had a slide about the approach and there was a question from Rickard. What is the approach and approach to? Promoting online training or a vision of online training? I need some help to figure out what this question is about. Yes, I can maybe go back to the slides if I remember where it was. Vision, I think it, let me see, this one. Right, so if I understand it correctly, the question is, is this an approach or a vision for promoting online training or a vision for online training? Yes. Is that the question? Right, yes. That's a very good question and thanks a lot for asking that because I really need to make it clear indeed. So the vision is for promoting. So the ways of promoting online training. It's not the vision of how online training should look like but it's the vision of how can we make sure that the online training solutions are actively adopted by companies and especially small companies. I hope I've answered that. Thank you. Yes, I think that was clear for all of us. Let me see. Here was another one. I'm interested in what is understood by online training like MOOCs, Lax MOOCs or what they're also, or not about community of practices and learning about buy and from communities of practices. Right, and that's what I also tried to address when I showed the definition in the beginning where I emphasize that we try to talk about online training in the broader sense as all kinds of learning that has a digital component in it, using digital technology. So it's a much broader perspective than just something being purely online. It can be also offline. It can be whatever is digital and it does not have to be formal training. It can be learning. We actually had a big discussion in the very end of this project when one of the steering committee members pointed out that the online training term may not be the best term to use here and we may even reconsider using it at all. But since we've been using it, we got it as it is already from the commission when we started working on the project and we already presented so many times the project itself that we had some kind of brand already established around this initiative. So we thought it could be a bit too dangerous to rebrand it at the very end. So we kept it, but we tried to write. So I bet you were there as well, indeed. Yeah, so we had very tough discussions about that. But I think what you have written here on this slide as well, shifting from the digital learning to what's learning in a digital world is very important to emphasize. Let me see. Catherine is saying you have a focus on SMEs. What differences do you see in promoting online training among academics? All right, that's a great question. Thank you so much. Well, although we have not focused on academics, but we occasionally heard some opinions from their side as well. And I have to say something really striking was mentioned by some people from academia when they said to us, actually, in our university, we kind of see that our professors, they try to hide the opportunities of online training from students because they sincerely think that they compete with those online trainings themselves and that they will become not needed anymore as teachers, as professors. So there is a kind of artificial, there is a kind of a resistance from professors, from teachers' side. So they do not promote it because they think that they will lose their jobs. So that I think is something which is typical. I'm not saying that it's typical for academia because I've seen great universities with lots of digitalization already in place. But that's something that you do not have with SMEs and companies probably because they do not compete with teachers, but here you have this too. And there was also discussion in the student committee we had about that academia need to be more involved in this kind of issues together with SMEs. Absolutely. That is also in your report. I have one question for you as well. Having presented all your findings in the background and also your visions and recommendations, what can we do to promote open learning in the workforce in Europe from our sides? What can each of us do? Yes, that's a great question. That's actually the central question of the whole initiative. I do not think I can answer it very quickly because it again, it depends on which position you are in, which stakeholder group you represent, right? But there are in our report and in our brochure what we tried to highlight those roles for specific stakeholder groups and try to highlight those key directions for action which starts from awareness raising. So we all need to work on raising awareness among companies that these tools do exist. They are at a quite high level of advancement and become better and better that these solutions become accessible. And actually very often they are even cheaper than traditional training or even for free. So we need to create this awareness. We need to make sure that these companies know where to go and where to find training but also that they get assistance with implementing it and hopefully also at the stage of developing training that they get engaged in developing it and making sure that it's relevant to their own needs and that we also finally to close the loop, we have to support them with sustaining the sculpture of learning. And I think just to summarizing what I was trying to say if we go back to the model that I showed, this habit loop model, that's actually what we all need to do because that's, you know, all these five elements, these are the elements we all have to work on and starting from the company but then at each level it adds up. So European Commission needs to work on it from their level, national organizations from their level and then so on. Then we will completing the cycle. Yes, right. We need to do the work both on a micro level, master level and micro level. And each of us can make a difference before you can get things happening. There is actually a final question on, also by Rickard on the second to the last slide. That was why I was moving in your slides. There was a reference on IE ecosystem or something similar. Can you give an example? This is the second last slide. Yes, here it was meant more like, oh yeah, it's here. That yes, AI augmented learning ecosystems and platforms. It means that we just need to start, well, we increasingly start using AI technologies and all the other digital solutions that are out there to tailor to personalize the content of trainings to the needs of specific users so that, yeah, to maximize the relevance. And in terms of examples, well, pretty much there are lots of different examples in companies what we've heard, for example, from IBM was a prominent example, but that's of course a big name, which small companies can hardly replicate on their own. But I would say that most modern learning platforms then they start already using these AI technologies to make sure that the content is tailored, is monitored, that the user is constantly observed and it gets the options that they're most suitable and relevant to the user. And so the systems that we will be building in the future, there will be more and more AI enabled and it's just the beginning of it, but we can hardly imagine what will be possible in a few years' time and what kind of solutions AI will be able to generate to us in the end. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm... So thank you very much again, Christina, for sharing your insights on this initiative with us. I would really recommend you to take part of the report. It's really, really useful. The background material, the desktop research and the interviews and the surveys are really, really comprehensive and your findings and recommendations are so interesting to deal with and take part of and to gain it to disseminate. And we can do a lot ourselves to make things happening. So thank you all for being with us for this hour, for this webinar. I'm sure there will be a lot of more questions. So we will have a chat at six o'clock p.m. Central European Time, I will moderate that one. And as I said, I have been involved in this project as well working with Christina. So I have also some insights in the project so we can continue the discussion. And then, so six o'clock p.m. and the hashtag is Eden Chat. And we have a next webinar coming up on the 26th of February with Alfredo Soreira, who also is an Eden EC member and it will be on IE. So you're welcome and that will be the board announcement from the Eden webpage. So thank you all very much and thanks a lot to Christina. Thank you very much. Also from my side, thank you. And thanks a lot to you, the Secretary, to have been behind the webinar doing all the technical things and announcement for this webinar. Thank you especially to Dora. So bye, see you next time. Bye-bye.