 the certification, but you have smaller valuable channels which you can take away even if you haven't completed your degrees. So, and then this, this, this organization Center for Non-Quality Policy in the US has created this alliance for quality career pathways which is really now trying for different professions in the US to map that out. How could this new landscape look like? Very, very interesting. The only past initiative is doing this for Europe towards a European better connected credential ecosystem that's where we want to go. We are looking into building credential descriptors to describe them. That's what you're also a little bit of that you will look into this afternoon also and also we are thinking and discussing together with a different initiative, another initiative which is called Micro-HE, which we are also running in parallel to the story pass initiative to think about how could you know you register this kind of thing, you know, you have it in your pocket, but how can you, so to speak, come to a system where you have an infrastructure around that where you can hook into your credentials and then it can be recognized. For example, I can open voluntary credential registry for example. The stakeholders, and this is now an introduction more and more and more in depth into this ecosystem, are the others, the credentialed others. That's clear, the students, the others, the professionals, they are the credentialed issuers, that's the educational institutions, educational institutions, training institutions, et cetera, et cetera. The credentialed consumers, we say, so the labor market, for example, it's the credentialed consumer of the credentials and then the endorsers and the endorsers are having the role, so to speak, to verify, to validate the credentials. In higher education, these are on accreditation agencies, so that's that's my last slide already, can you imagine, I'm really surprised, I thought it was much longer. So, I'll tell you about these two initiatives, micro-HD and homie-pass, they're running since roughly a year, a bit less, homie-pass is looking into credentials of a small granularity, okay, a small granularity. Something you learned somewhere, and micro-HD is looking into, yeah, we have just thought about the term, into micro-qualifications. If you think about the European qualification framework, you have the definition of qualifications, their bachelor degrees, master degrees, doctorate programs and so on, but there is nothing, so to speak, to define below these qualifications. That's why we are advocating in micro-HD to develop a framework for micro-qualifications, so that also below, so to speak, qualifications, but above the very small granularity. So, starting from five ECTS points on the board, we want to develop this framework for this kind of chess, so to speak. So, these two initiatives keep them in mind, we're going to shave it a little bit, and we are focusing on credentials in OE-pass. We want to create this kind of documentation possibility for Europe, because so far we have linked in, and we don't want to leave this documentation, that's a mandate to a private company, we want to have a European infrastructure, which is in the public good hands, so to speak, yeah. Yeah, and create a structure category, a metadata system, of course, facilitating recognition, so that's the introduction, and now I would probably hand it back to you. Yep, thank you very much, Charles. Just before we move on to Anthony's, bear in mind that all for us to go in about 50 minutes, if you have any questions or comments, now would be the time to make one. Let's have one over there. No pressure. No pressure. Just a sense from the university, thank you for that excellent class. The problem I, the big problem I have to see with this is that we've already had the European degree supplement, and that's also been a piece of that paper, it's costing students more money, so that doesn't give me a very good feeling that at the European level, this is going to happen. The problem I see is that the universities don't accept these credentials in their own country. So if the university gives me this credential, they won't say that inside the same university, this is proof I have the degree, they make me apply for the ministry degree. So this is, you know, this is, there's a lot in Spain, it's a big hill to climb. It's a little bit of a draw me, so everybody can go where they are. What we are thinking about is, and maybe Anthony, you can say some things about that as well, is actually what you're describing is recognition processes. These are actually administrative processes, and we have the vision that we can facilitate these processes much better through a technological infrastructure, I didn't talk about that today at all, but that's behind these initiatives as well to create a blockchain-based credentialing infrastructure. I understand that, I don't see technically it's possible, but there are very big interests, there's the interest to keep the system going. Yeah, I just wanted to add on that, I mean, we're going to discuss it later on, but in the very end, the key aspect is trust, and in order to increase the trust for recognition, you need to have a certain standard, and you need to speak to a certain extent the language of prudential evaluators and higher education institutions. We're going to discuss it later, it has happened before, I mean, it is if you look at MOOC platforms, if you look at edX, if you look at Coursera, if you look at FutureLearn, all of them are currently developing, what you're saying, they're developing like open education-based micro-qualifications, micro-master, whatever it's called, that can become parts of degrees within these institutions. That already is a major step to compare to the very beginnings of massive open online education, and what has also developed is that step by step, and providers of open educational opportunities are looking more and more into the quality criteria for these opportunities, which means you need to be able to translate it into the formal systems that you're talking about, and that's what we're doing in order to have this catalyst for increasing trust. In the end, it's all about increasing trust. For that, you need to speak their language, you need to know it's difficult, and it is seen as a threat at many institutions, but you need to take especially those along who are already piloting it throughout Europe and worldwide, and in order to have the broad range. And I think the European Commission is very interested in further extending such approaches, and we believe that we shouldn't look at it as a problem, but as an opportunity that has to be further developed, knowing that it's not something we can solve today, but we can maybe solve within the next five years having more flexible pathways. I'm very much in favor of this. Don't get me wrong. You like it to be a European director, but the Commission, to say to universities, the game is over, you have to combine, because the incremental approach is going to be difficult. But before you present it to the Commission, you actually have to do the research, chicken and the egg. Never hide away at the Commission level, that can never happen, because simply enough, the Commission doesn't have competence in education. Actually, I reckon it's solved. The first step is creating mutual agreements between universities to accept rules is to finish somewhere else, okay? And there are some initiatives to do that. In the case of universities, five universities can agree to accept certain courses in national sciences, to make such an agreement as well. So the final thing is to have a fuller view. It's the modules are there at the time, and the learning outcomes are the same as what I wanted in my university, and it can be accepted. But we have to prove that it's all the same standards, and all things in this project is about concrete standards that can be linear to be synchronized, first of all in my whole university, and also in another university, and going beyond the mutual agreement level. Okay, can we have just one more question? One short question. What's the logic behind the five CTS microprudential? It's much work already, yeah? 150 hours of work, yeah? Why not? This is more than the usual course at university for a semester. So what's the logic there behind it? We have this lecture visitation, and we have two projects, two initiatives, very important by creation. We passed looking into everything under, below five, and micro-HG, roughly, and everything above. And the idea was that we were thinking we don't want to break, for micro-HG, for this above five ECTS, the idea was we don't want to, so to speak, powder up higher education, but we would like first now to start with chunks which are up to 30 ECTS, like these standard degrees from edX or from Paseo also, and try to see how does it work with them. And five ECTS is already quite low if you think about, you modularize your 180 ECTS batch line to chunks of five, and you can have them recognized and portable and reconfigurable into new situations. It's already quite challenging, but maybe then, if we manage, we will go, you know, that's the answer to the question. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. So, that's what we're going to be doing. Okay, so, off the course of today, we're going to be looking at two different aspects linked to credentials. Unfortunately, we're starting with the slightly duller of the tool that I will try. But essentially, what we'll be looking into is before you go and build tech and systems for credentials, you actually need to understand what a credential is and what a quality credential is, so that you can reflect that in the requirements. And when we started the OEPAS part of the project, the filming of the project, it's actually really important for us. What we started with is that people have been working on this problem for a long time in Europe. I mean, you're familiar with all the keywords on the board. ECTS, European standards and guidelines for quality shores, diploma supplements, European qualification frameworks. I mean, every couple of years, we seem to be inventing a new recognition tool. But all those recognition tools actually have been created for a very, very tiny part of education. They're created for traditional higher education and for essentially experiences of a year or more. As soon as you get under that, even though maybe some of the principles behind this could work, none of the tools were actually designed to do that. And so when we look at the open educational providers, the MOOC providers, the ATXs, the Corsairs of this world, they looked at what existed and just said, listen, this isn't working for us. And they basically started inventing their own credentials. They don't use ECTS, they don't use a keyword and so on and so forth. And so one of the things we are realizing is that the differences between formal education, more formal education, informal, between a certified, between an accredited qualification, all of these are becoming less clear and they're becoming a little bit fuzzier. So to some extent, the logic behind our project is that we should use some of this fuzziness to our advantage. Simply enough, if you look at the principles behind, say, the diploma supplement which you mentioned, let's make the learning, which was achieved clear by some world document. Let's look at ECTS principle, this modularization of education. Let's look at EQF, which is the Common Language for Credentials. These principles can actually be applied at different levels of education and be applied for different types of education if we just choose to experiment them and take them out of the higher educational bubble to some extent. So the project is based on five steps. First of all, figuring out what quality credential is, which is what we'll be talking about this morning. Secondly, enhancing the transparency of credentials by creating a learning passport. And our idea of a learning passport is basically the same kind of thing you could call it a diploma supplemental steward. Something that is highly automated and also highly informative and that works at different levels of education. Then, because we say that we want to automate, we figure out the tech behind this and we also figure out some of the metadata and so on that we go into it. The final part of it is that the policy aspect. If we're going to enable micro credentials and if we're going to, let's say, promote these alternative forms of credentials, that's going to bring a significant amount of entry to education systems. And so we wanted to do a little bit of just forecasting to actually understand what the effect of this would be to higher education institutions and how they might be able to adapt to that. This is the quick list of partners that's taking part. And what's interesting to see here is you have a mixture of consultancies, non-profit foundations, universities, and networks who are all working together on this problem. So it brings together quite an interesting set of perspectives that work on this. So we were talking about credentials and types of credentials. These are some of the words you will find badly around these days. Nanodegrees, micromasters, badges, licenses, endorsements. And the interesting thing is, even though universities are supposedly institutions that are in the business of offering degrees, you find universities offering all of these as well. And when you ask them, are these part of your standard offering? The answer is usually that it's somewhere in a grid zone. Nobody's really quite sure the status of these things within institutions. And the other part of this is that a lot of these terms are also linked to particular technologies. So on one part they seem to be a standard, on the other part they seem to be a technology and there's sometimes some confusion of what exactly the credential is. So coming to this, and this was already explained by Wolf, we come with the definition of a credential. And this definition is quite important because it sets the basis for the whole quality system. And that is that a credential is simply enough a documented statement. It's a documented statement from one person to another, saying this person knows something. And it's used for the purposes of gaining access to whatever you want to gain access to. If you look at this specifically in the realm of educational credentials, the diagram you saw before from Wolf was let's say all credentials of any type, anything from press credentials to education. But if we look specifically at educational credentials, then what you see there that is that there's essentially four types of commonly used ones. You've got the formal qualifications and that's really the bread and butter of universities and of accredited education institutions. They're awards at the end of a formal educational experience with a formal exam that leads to a formal certificate. And the European Qualifications framework and all these recognition tools are essentially in this box. But you've got another three which we need to think about. You've got non-formal certificates which are effectively the ones that are offered at the end of a non-formal course with some kind of assessment why the assessment isn't necessarily an examination. You've got recognition of skills, typical examples of language proficiency exams. I can speak Swahili and you give me an exam to certify my Swahili degrees. And then you have records of experience which basically are certificates of participation without any assessment projects or any others. And this is the entire ecosystem of education. And within that, we actually did a mapping of different credentials offered by different institutions around Europe. And I mean, we stopped the list at 200. So there is a very, very wide variety of credentials offered in the post form. Now, the purpose of credentials then is recognition and portability. You want to personally present the credential to recognize that credential. That's why you have it. There's also a side purpose that you can put it on the wall and look at it. But generally, the purpose of a credential is to be able to share it with somebody and have them recognize what's suitable for that. And so in terms of just an overall quality indicator for credentials, we would argue, Geo, that the higher the recognition and portability, the higher the quality of the credential. Very, very simple question. The simplicity of that now shows a lot of complexity. So traditionally, a credential statement has been evaluated in terms of the quality of working at representatives and of the elements it consists of. And this is based on work of first of all, Nuffig, which is the Dutch recognition agency, as well as all of their new households sometimes at these conferences. And what you find here is saying that, listen, to have a good quality credential, it has to distract the learning outcomes. It has to distract the quality assurance system, the EQF level, the workload, the methods of assessment, the identity of the learner, and the identity issue. And you check each of these things and then you see if that's actually valid. And that is considered to be a quality credential. And while this is useful for recognition purposes when you know the other credentials, we would like to postulate to you that these elements have quality systems behind them. And the example I'd like to give is let's take a quality statement. I am to become a Larry or you one million years. Now, if I write it in a contract that is a low quantity, it has a certain legal status. It is signed by the lawyer that has a certain education and professional license and so on. That contract has a certain value. If I take the exact statement and write it on a napkin in a restaurant, I owe you one million dollars, would these two have the same recognition status? There's actually some really interesting law court cases about once written on this. But the answer is generally, this has less value than this. Even though the statement is the same.