 and distance learning week 2021. We are still waiting for participants to join and we will then start this panel discussion. In the meantime feel free to say hello in the chat and tell us where are you from. You can tell us also how the weather is like in your place from where you are attending this webinar. Welcome again to everyone. As I mentioned, this is the opening session of Eden's European online and distance learning week, the sixth edition in 2021 and we are very happy to host this whole event in partnership with Open Distance Learning Association in Australia jointly with Flexible Learning Association of New Zealand and the United States Distance Learning Association. Also, we have a special contribution, webinar contribution by ICDE in this event. So you can see we are working a lot on collaboration and cooperation. As I mentioned, feel free to say hello in the chat and introduce yourselves where are you from, from what institution, maybe you can tell us how the weather is like and then when we have the presentations feel free to ask questions using the Q&A section and our distinguished guests, speakers will answer those questions. As I mentioned, this is the opening session so we are very honored to start this whole week until the 10th of November. You have daily sessions organized by Eden and we encourage you to attend as many as possible. During this panel, we propose a discussion about good practices of how to integrate digital education in higher education institutions. So if we learn something from the past two years, we learned that knowing how to integrate and implement digital education is a must in these periods, in these times and those institutions who already knew how to do this were well prepared and responded better in these times of pandemic. I am happy to see that we have people from many, many places. We have people from India, from Croatia, from Italy, from Romania, from Finland, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Greece and many other countries. I'm sorry if I didn't mention all of it, all of you. And now, I think the introduction part is enough. My name is Vlad Mikhaelsko. I always forget to introduce myself. I am the Eden NAP steering committee chair and Eden NAP is one of the entities governing bodies of Eden and we try to help and encourage collaboration and a big community of researchers and deducticians specialized in online learning. It is my great honor to introduce the first speaker of today's panel. This is Edmundo Tovar. He comes from the Technical University of Madrid where he received the computer engineering degree and PhD from this institution. He is currently a professor of information technology in enterprise. He has served as an elected member of the board of directors of open courseware consortium, executive director of the open courseware office of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and executive director of the open education office in the same university. Currently, he is the president of IEEE education society. He leads the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid research group, preference in technologies applied to open education. And I'm really looking forward to hearing his presentation. Edmundo, thank you for joining us and the floor is yours. Can you see the ice cream now? Yes, we can see if you start the presentation. Thank you very much for your interaction. It is a real pleasure for me to participate in this conference, in this panel in particular sharing my experience with my colleagues Alfredo and Diana. Thank you for your invitation to participate here and my greetings to all the audience that realize that it's very wide in several geographical areas of the world. So thank you, everybody. So my talk will serve to introduce digital practice. Edmundo, I'm sorry to interrupt. Maybe if you start present mode, we will see better if it's possible. Thank you and sorry. Yes, okay. Can you see better now? Because I think that if I put in a presentation mode, I think that there is problem with film. Ah, okay. But you can see now with these sides? Okay, we can go with this. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, my talk will serve to introduce digital practices from my viewpoint as president of one professional organization as is the IEEE Education Society. The recent need is shown from the pandemic by almost all the awards, higher education teaching staff to move towards remote distractions find in university and professional associations the promoters in which to develop the new teaching learning models. My talk has an introduction. I will talk about the current situation about the digital transformation specifically in education, talking or making reference of the drivers and barriers for academic professional career, the competences for educators and the role that IEEE Education Society has related to this area. I will introduce briefly the IEEE ecosystem to help the teachers that as consequence of the pandemic has emerged to facilitate the rapid transition from classes online environment around different dimensions of education for academic in universities. Let me firstly to introduce quickly what is the IEEE Education Society. Okay, you have here in our website, you have here all the information that you can find related to our activities specifically about obviously educational opportunities and other areas that we have developed or we are working as journals, standards, conferences, etc. So only the IEEE Education Society, I know a global overview, you can see that was founded in 1957 is one for that reason is one of the oldest technical societies. It's a community of professionals dedicated to ensuring high quality education in science and engineering and our objectives in some as an international organization is the promotion advances and disseminate the state of the art, scientific information and resources related to the our society's field of interest that is education and technologies and educational technologies. You have here a very good summary of our strategy plan. We are we have in all our areas we have these are our main strategy goals in the standards divisions. We try to sponsor and for virtual graduate studies consortium, no limited time in Spain, only at the given conference in publication division we develop or we are working to attract solutions for disseminating and curating knowledge, enhance journal relevance. We have about conferences division to raise the recognition level of society. Fluxy Fluxy conference, we have four Fluxy conferences about the journals we have four four journals, one of them is open is it's a free access. I would like to facilitate the creation and management of chapter to promote chapter best practices, but here we are we are talking about our education educational offer. So we will try to engage members through professional development activities, subterrativities and other events, etc. In education, so specifically in education, we have a strong webinar collaboration with IEEE Educational Activities Board, a distinguished program educational we are trying to promote and communicate our awards and our offers through our chapters, conference, etc. So but I would like to explain a little more about the complex organization or the complex structure of IEEE. I say that one of the of our strategy is to be aligned and collaborate with something and unit that is called Educational Activities Board. Educational Activities Board is one of the main units in the governance of IEEE in general that is in charge of the development and delivery of continuing education products and activities. There is a business area that has several products and services as a main platform and that is called IEEE Learning Networks with all our courses that you can access by subscription through universities, etc. This is the business area of IEEE in educational matters, but so we are collaborating with this unit in order to to have more impact in our initiatives, in our in our products and the services that we provide. Okay, going to the to the core of this panel about the educational about digital practices in education. So the first the beginning of my presentation is to say that we are living we are in the middle of the of the digital transformation of the society in general, but not only the society and specifically in education. So the next one so I will do I will make a reference to a couple of european technical reports. The first one is about is innovation professional development and higher education and here we have identified several drivers for the growing need for for the career profession for the professional career of the faculty in higher education. The first one is the massification of higher education, the massification because we are living in the last decades. We are we are living a high rise of the enrollment of the student enrollment. So simultaneously we have students that that adopting a new model, they are more active in their academic development and they engage in the co-production of education that that they receive. Here we have a student center models of higher education and have emerged it where they are more frequently positioned as consumers and not only the partners of products. The another one the another driver that we have is the digital transformation of higher education. The importance of the digital technologies that we have and that we can access in higher education in this moment. The process of creating a culture of digital transformation of education requires in the first place the training of teachers with new ways of taking advantage of digital technologies that can help in the educational innovation and there are changes in the nature of professional competition because the professional success is not only based in the academic performance you know but it's important to recognize that the that the professional career is based in our skills and the knowledge and experience that we have. For instance the educational practices has to be focused on skills, competences etc. So there are all there I will talk about now about the main obstacles to academic participation in continuous professional development. This is something that I have instructed from another european report is that firstly is that the academics unwillingness to move away from traditional teaching practices. This is something that we know obviously just before of the pandemic but now the faculty the faculty has very well reacted to the new challenges that we have but in the past the moment that this report has been delivered has been launched the problem is that is that the resistance to the change of the academics particular. Another obstacle that we have to to face is the lack of formal requirements of our incentives for teaching developments and higher education institutions. The lack of time for the professional career aim of university staff. The lack of financial organizational and institutional capacity to develop effective professional career schemes at the higher education level. So just before of the pandemic we can identify a low participation of academics in innovative projects in spite of the driver for a professional career in higher education. Okay this is the context that I think related to the competencies of educators in general. Just before of the of the pandemic but everybody is everybody agrees that the pandemic has served as accelerator of changes to improve and to overcome all these obstacles. So as my viewpoint as professional professional association is to serve to our membership that is constituted by mainly by teachers in general is to focus now how which are the products and services that we are provided to our teachers in order to adapt to it to to accelerate this digital transformation and to improve in the digital competencies that they need to use in the in the universities in which they are working. Okay so this is one of the references that we can take talking about educators competencies. This is the european digital competence framework for educators. So there are several dimensions for educators the professional, pedagogic and learners competencies. Okay we are we go quickly. This is the digital framework distinguishes six different areas in which educators digital competencies expect with a total of 22 competencies. So I will focus on the skills related to digital resources. According to this framework the educators has to select digital resources. This is a problem of the discovery of resources. They had to they had to create and modify digital resources and to manage and protect and sharing digital resources. In this context I would like to review the services that I truly believe education society is offering in that moment. Obviously we offer a program of webinars. You have here a summary of the one of the online events that we have organized for 2021. Many of them are organized with this unit of governance in the country that I explained before that is education is EAV educational activities board. We have talked about resources for university faculty as again I think that this is one of the priorities that all the professional organizations have. I would like to obviously we have our own program of educational products and services for instance about MOOCs. I would like to highlight that we are collaborating with other organizations for instance with Merlot. This is an open repository that supports 25 different disciplines. We have an agreement with Merlot in order to participate in the editorial board of two of these disciplines in computer science and information technology. We have a collaboration with Merlot. We have developed our teaching with technology resource center. This is only to host or to provide links access to open educational resources. The education society teaching resource center is the current challenge lecture or entity structure that need to use online instruction to address the teaching assignment. These are the structure of the kind of contents that this center has about IEEE resources, Merlot specifically resources, other ones and how to participate. We use one of the social network of IEEE that is called Collaboratec. I would like to say that we are organizing in this moment we have an open call to participate in the second annual student OER contest that this is that we organize in collaboration with the IEEE Computer Society in one of the awards are delivered in the in one of the flagship conference of computer society that is Comsac and I would like to focus more in our main product that can be useful for our teachers that is IEEE Teaching Excellence Hub. Okay, this is a collaboration again with the IEEE Educational Activities Board. You have here who are the coaches. This is our staff, is our vice president of educational activities and by and they here participate in other representatives of the staff of IEEE. The Teaching Excellence Hub is an open access website for those teaching engineering, computer and technology at the university level is oriented to our teachers to help them to develop the professional development. It contains curated content including short articles, professional events and other resource collection. There will be, okay, there will be an online webinar about, it's here so no, there will be a next Tuesday, November 9 and webinar in order to explain how the Teaching Excellence Hub is working. You have here the access and the way to register. So now I was I was talking for 20 minutes. I think that is my time. I want to be, I want to be strictly to meet the criteria of the length of my time. So my vision is try to to give you a global knowledge about that in order to help in the development of the competences of educators in general specifically for universities, education society, my organization is helping in collaboration with other units, is helping with several activities and focus on repositories and resources for this topic. Thank you very much. This is my contribution at this moment. Thank you Edmundo. One short question before we move to our next speaker. If you can give us some example of how Polytechnica of Madrid managed to get over in these times and how they implemented digital practices in the education. Yes, in my university there are, okay, we can distinguish between two different sides. One of them is the is the technical and infrastructure logistics in order to provide the different technologies to the community of educators. This is obviously we have to adapt to a new environment with a blended audience in person and virtual students. But in this moment in Spain we are living a more relaxed time for the restrictions to phrase to the pandemic. So in this moment from the beginning of October, since beginning of October, we retrieve the teaching in person 100 percent. So we try to to take over the habits of our students to come back to our installation. So we try to remove all the facilities that we provide to our students to attend to our classes in an online environment, because we are not an online university. So the priority of our rectory team is that to recover all the practices in in person modality. About the pedagogies, this is another side. We have an office of educational innovation at the university that we have periodically calls to present educational projects in order to improve. And obviously in this moment after the pandemic, they call, try to attract proposals that join the use of the new technologies with the new pedagogical models that we need to phrase to this to this to this time. Thank you, El Mundo. This was very interesting. We will get back to see if we have questions in the end of the session from participants. And now it is my pleasure to introduce the second speaker of the day, my colleague from Politecnica University of Timisoara Diana Andone. Diana is the director of the eLearning Center of our university. She is responsible for planning and implementing digital technologies, online learning technologies, and also several platforms, award-winning platforms of our university, involved in several research projects in relation to eLearning and digital culture and everything which is related to how to include good digital practices into education. Diana was recently awarded the distinguished chapter leadership award by IEEE Education Society and today she will present us some interesting study cases of good practices in digital education. Diana, please, the floor is yours. Thank you very, very much for this. I hope you all can hear me very well and I will go directly into the presentation mode and please let me know that you are seeing the right screen. Just a small nod will be good for me. Thank you so much for this. So practices in digital education for universities and I will speak briefly about my university. Sorry for this, apologies. I will try not to move too much the mouse. So I will speak briefly about my university in Polytechnic University of Kimishwara, but also something about the project in which we are involved and which luckily, believe it or not, the other two speakers at this are also their universities part of. So this is why I selected exactly these two projects to introduce and to present something more. What we are doing in my university is part of what we call the digital education strategy of the university which was in fact initiated about 12 years ago when we started with a full digitization of different tools and of creating the support and also the skills of our educators and students towards creating this full digitization of the university. We obviously used the early adapters into that and then we moved in the last three, four years towards the digitalization when we tried to create more of a digital education ecosystem and trying to create also students as co-creators of content and of open educational resources. We consider ourselves that now we are trying to do as much as possible of the digital transformation, even if we are a very traditional technical university or brick and mortar as it's called university which is just doing usually face-to-face education in a very traditional way with hands-on and practical approach and working closely with the industry. We are trying to bring as much as possible of the academic culture change towards changing the use of digital tools in education. So as I said, a part of digitization was building the university virtual campus and also the unique campus which is the Romanian version of open online courses which is supported by my university and a lot of training. Our main focus, especially probably in the last seven, eight years, was on training the staff and also the students and this is what happened in one year in the pandemic education in Romania, in my university, sorry in the technical university, we exploded completely in the creation of resources and of materials. I will only drag this to you that we have more than 20,000 more new interactive resources created only in one year in our university and a lot of working tasks the same over 20,000 for a university which enrolls at this moment only around 16 to 17,000 students which are all coming from traditional face-to-face normal education and their undergrad and master students. What we have done also beside that is a lot of webinars and I'm happy to see a lot of Romanians also into this webinar which we follow somehow after Eden models online together. They're called the same but they're done basically for the Romanian community of education and we managed to have very successful attendance and interactivity and we awarded also for the first time in Romania some digital badges. We moved on to digitalization where we try to create this ecosystem and I will briefly show what we have done and collaboration and co-creators and the virtual mobilities. So obviously what we have done towards this development of the what to say the open lifelong learning students which is our main focus since the last 11 years and of the entire digital education strategy was to use and to integrate as much as possible open educational resources and open online courses into the curricula to build up a full virtual campus around this idea so not only like LMS like learning management system but as a virtual campus and tomorrow my colleague Andrej also who is the head of the virtual campus of the university will present the results more from a technical perspective and also the impact and the support which we gave to our staff and students to focus a lot on virtual mobilities and for that we had several successful projects in the university some for even more than 10 years and some only in the last five or four years and to move towards micro credentials and when I was speaking about open virtual mobility we finalized two years one year and a half in fact ago the open virtual mobility project which was selected as a good example by the European Union where we try to create a hub for staff and students from higher education to learn how to build up a virtual mobility so there are 24 courses which you still can find for free about getting ready for virtual mobilities and I will encourage you to do that and then the end you will be able to receive a badge so we introduce the open credentials to recognize the skills so you will be able to apply further easier to the Rasmus new scheme of shorter or even longer virtual mobilities which was introduced in the last year another successful project which helped us on how to say creating this ecosystem in my university was ABC to VLE led by the university college London probably this is a very famous method of learning design the ABC to learn to LD learning design based on Diana Lorela's principles at the beginning where you use a lot of tools and a lot of integration towards all the the six main sections on learning like acquisition collaboration discussion investigation practice and production and to all of them you create also scenario and the learning path and a map to create that we integrated a lot of resources and tutorials to support those tools part of the tools not all of them and we call them the guide and the diagram of ABC to VLE which is available and in Romanian and in other 18 languages I mean the method so you can find it also on the ABC to VLE website we moved then to the digital transformation and here we have quite an innovative project to which we are working now part of the ABC which is the European blockchain service infrastructure where my university and my colleagues are working very much on building up the the full not to say diploma validation and recognition from the Romanian universities into ABC so using blockchain infrastructure and blockchain system so the digital credentials will be as valid as the physical potential so to validate easy and worldwide the diplomas gain from European the full Romanian university at this moment we already tested in fact yesterday the first two diplomas how they are working with epsin so jointly with our European Union project partners which are all coming from each country is only one partner so in Romania it's us together with the National National Council for Higher Education the other bit which I want to focus on is the students as co-creators because that's quite important you need to be able to encourage the students to be part of the learning system and we've done this extensively in my university and not only in the last year as you can see also physically but quite strongly in the last year when students created either resources directly for labs and for educational resources which were reused a year later with the new new cohorts or with the industry so real practical examples which you can use and then deliver to the industry and to the community a project in which we are now working which is trying to change the curriculum design to use the MOOC based innovative instructional approach to integrate them in higher education it's called MODA IT and we are a lot of partners here and here as I said it's Polytechnica Deporto from where Alfredo is coming here is also partner is led by the Fahoschule Mittelstands from Germany, Kaunas University of Technology, Anadolu University and us and it's called MODA IT and please find out a lot of information about this also the MODA IT as I said it's focusing more on curriculum so if the others were focusing more on skills and abilities and trying to build up also forms of accreditation or credentials there is more focusing on curriculum so you need to think how you are changing the higher education infrastructure and higher education instructors and educators awareness and skills towards adapting to more flexible and open methods today in another meeting I heard the new term like high-flex which is coming from hybrid and flexible so how you make hybrid education and flexible education more popular and here is some of the ideas from that what we are doing into this project we are looking for set an online self-assessment tool so every educator can take that and then evaluate themselves on where they stand towards the 27 competencies which we defined for this we design and we run already the first part of the online training for MOOC designing the educators we are now in the middle of developing the new curriculum for several courses and then obviously the the ambit of about implementing that curriculum online self-assessment tool the process was quite easy obviously we done first the selection of the competencies then we look at the focus groups we done a consolidation and we run the piloting and these are the 20 as I said the principles and the 27 pedagogical and technical competencies were split into five areas they were looking at pedagogical competencies for designing students and learning then MOOC specific ones which are especially about learning motivation and how to assess and work with groups technology related competencies about learning analytics and communication then obviously about independent learning and the openness and then how to integrate peers into evaluation and assessment and how to do that into formal learn we done the piloting we had several hundreds of assets to the self-assessment tool in the pilot phase and here you can see some of the evaluation from the self-assessment tool which shows quite clearly that quite a lot of them agreed that the competencies usually and those 27 competencies which we identify which are also strongly related with the digital competencies from European Union for educators those the related to educators and we looked also at how self was designed for school educators so we quite got good results on that perspective and also we moved then in the spring of this year to deliver and obviously first to create and then to deliver the open online training program dedicated to educators which was already run and delivered and it was based on five learning modules foundation of online learning MOOC course design MOOC content production delivery and MOOC informal learners each of the partners delivered one module and the module were based on videos and text and a lot of activities as interactive as it was possible and we use moodle environment to deliver it we had 125 participants coming from partner university so this was available only for partner universities in the pilot mode we are now seeking how to open this online training program for the other I mean for the community of educators at least in Europe if not worldwide and also was evaluated on how the new skills of the higher education were achieved or not towards that part we are now in the process of we selected 20 professors and courses which need to adapt and change their curriculum and their curriculum design as it was learned or trained part of the modi training program and we try to see how that is going to be run into formal education where is not that easy as you know to change another curriculum the other project which we are also focusing it's a new project which started almost eight months ago is akadija which is augmented teaching through blended learning and this puts digital into academia sorry and again University of Porto but also Polytechnica del Madrid from where Edmondo is coming are part of this consortium and we are working with University of Polytechnica del Marca with National Technical University of Athens with Trinity College Dublin and with Innova which is supporting us as a company working with digital tools and digitalization what we are planning to do there sorry is obviously to foster the synergies from the six countries and to try to learn from the experiences of the past two years in almost two years in online learning and in hybrid education for some and accelerator readiness of this polytechnic technical universities towards the adapting of digital tools and digital resources and also to create the availability of the tools for the educators obviously we have some intellectual outputs the first one is a compendium of augmented blended teaching which we have just recently finished or almost finished and we are now validating and evaluating we are preparing now for training the mentors because this is believing quite a lot on ambassadors on early adapters which are the mentors of the colleagues and of the students to how to use digital tools and digital methods in higher education in technical universities and obviously at the end trying to send this towards the others and try to implement this at large scale at least in our university as I said we have done national reports and analyze of how technical universities in our countries have been looking and working and trying to reinvent everything the whole in in this period of online education or remote teaching or call it as you want and how all of those have changed the pedagogy and also the use of technology in education we are we have also analyzed some of the tools and we which for which we created the validation and we will integrate them into the support and training because based on the evaluation at national level those were the tools which were most used by everybody in the technical university so based on all of those our final target in all the practices in higher education probably in the entire Europe is to how to create the open lifelong learning student which besides of having the future skills and the 21st century skills and the digital competencies they will need to learn independently and they will need to be self-contained and resilient and how you will be able to do that is probably not easy and all of these tools and projects and structures and support which I try to indicate to you will probably help that I need to thank my team everything which we do as we speak about practices in digital education is with my team which I'm always only the top of the iceberg and beside me there are a lot of them and thank you very much and please contact me if you need anything at all thank you thank you Diana for this thorough presentation we have seen several examples of good practice both inside the university and also in the consortiums and projects our university is a part of there are several questions in the Q&A for you I will keep some of them for the end but I would like you to answer one of the most interesting in my opinion so from Lai from KU Leuven he is asking if you can tell a little bit more about how the university is training developing the student's ability to be co-creators in the digital education that's a very difficult question if I can say and it's not an easy one to answer very quickly and very directly basically because in fact we have a paper and I'll try to find it and indicate it to you about that so we basically we trained them first we created also a sort of short guide on what what sort of methods and tools they need to use to be able to somehow have to say move towards creators where we look at tools we look at the principles and also we invest quite a lot on on showcasing to them and encouraging them to use open educational licenses creative commons licenses to to put that up and then we train also some of the professors on how to encourage that and how to incorporate that into their activities because one thing is very important to say this when students are doing this they need to get a grade for that and so it needs to be clearly integrated into their activity we've been able to do this in four different methods the most common one is project base so they will have a topic for which they will need to work in teams or alone and to create a project team or a project structure and to integrate that some of the others have been activity based so then it will be an activity in a lab or an activity about a tool or a big activity about an industry which they will do for which they will need to do the research and then sometimes they will even record the video about a lab activity or a lab testing and then add explanation and create some interactivity using different tools which we we gave to the university also with the tutorials for how to use them and then publish them some of the others have been focusing on their how to say co-creation on the things which came from industry and this is a long-standing thing which we do in my university even when I was a student many many years ago a lot of the projects which I was doing in the final years not only the final project were small projects directly coming from industries which they will like us to research and test and validate and a lot of those after that they become somehow presented as what you learned what was good what was bad and they are incorporated into the education part of that course of subject on how to run a project with industry and obviously there are many others like innovation labs and so on which we are doing recently it's not easy but with encouragement and that's my final idea don't imagine that this is happening everywhere in my university I keep calling these are pockets of innovation but they are the early adopters and the ambassadors which after that create a change because a lot of people follow them after that it's an ambition to be the best or better than your colleague or than the previous generation and then it's happening thank you and let's hope that this pocket will grow and they will encompass the whole university we will get back with the questions at the end of the session thank you for your presentation and now allow me to move to the final panelist of today's session Alfredo Soiro from University of Porto in Portugal he holds the degrees in civil engineering at University of Porto and the University of Florida where he has his doctorate he is a director of the University of Porto past president of EACE, AUPEC, CEPI and several other organizations he's also a colleague with me in the Eden Executive Committee and in the Eden Map Steering Committee with a lot of experience in e-learning specifically on assessment of competencies, construction management and the use of digital tools it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Alfredo Alfredo please the floor is yours thank you good afternoon everyone Blatt and my colleagues in the panel and all the participants it's good to see 86 people listening to what my colleagues had said I'll try to keep up with the level but bear in mind that I decided to talk about something that it's very dear to me very important to me which is the assessment of the effectiveness of the teaching that we are all talking about because assessment is and you're going to see in my presentation is key for how do I say for everyone specifically the learners and in fact we cannot I'm trying to share the screen just for a moment in fact what happens is that when we try to let me show you our point here it is when we try to verify if what we are doing is really an excellent choice in terms of choice of methods and techniques and etc we need to know if the learners learn and we may have a lot of faith in what we are choosing and proposing but if we don't verify if the learners learn then maybe we are not so successful so my presentation is a little bit different from the others if you want to know what happens in my university it's very simple we had already a supporting e-learning unit for many years since when I was a pro-rector and what they did is that they had extra work with the pandemic they were submerged with requests from teachers and from departments and from faculties and it was very difficult for them but they were prepared because they had been doing that for a long time so they continued to do their training courses recorded and they produced a lot of webinars for training the staff helping them to surpass this this request for digital education during the pandemic currently things like Edmundo has mentioned in Vienna also things are going back to normal and a lot of presential teaching is being done so some of the colleagues have abandoned their practices online so I chose to talk about assessment and because what we're going to do is basically we are talking about micro credentials and other things but if you don't verify if the macro credentials are good enough they don't have respect by the others by the partners in society so we need to evaluate the learning outcomes of the micro credentials and other and other courses books etc so that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit this is the structure of my presentation and let me bring to you a definition of assessment that derives from the Latin word that means to sit with where we probably should be working more with the student to assess their learning outcomes than doing how do I say assessments and evaluations that are not personal and that's something that this idea to sit with the student comes from I remember I had a teacher when I was 10 years old that's what he used to do he used to sit with us in our in our chairs in our student shares and talk with us about things and what have we learned about this let me tell you a story that was even for one of my colleagues he asked which plate he liked most and when he was sitting and asked well if you get these questions right I'll tell your mother to give you this plate next next lunch so these are the things that probably we are forgetting with with the online learning that we probably have to work more with the students to know what they know and to guarantee that's embedded in the reasons the students want success the teachers want compliance with their learning outcomes and society what wants quality assurance so that's why it's so important and one of the projects that I've been involved and it's available on the web the tool it's tried to find the right assessments for the different type of learning outcomes and this alignment is not easy and the tool is just presenting suggestions this is not a simple problem we we generally make exams and assessments based on on knowledge sometimes on skills but very little on attitudes for us we have to find assessment methods for attitudes I'm an engineer I teach engineers I want professional attitudes as engineers this is the tool this is a print screen of the tool where the the title is precisely ask for assessment that pass which assessment you should choose for each type of learning outcome you write the learning outcome and you you find suggestions this is one example of a project I've been involved also to define assessment modes for the different type of learning outcomes this is a qualification framework for engineers the dimension is knowledge and understanding and you can find the proposals from the tool in the bottom of the page and that exists for all the competencies of this qualification framework there are other experience on this question of assessment and I have here one based on e-portfolio there are many people researching the use of e-portfolios to assess the learning and to mentor and adjust the teaching in accordance with the needs from the students I don't think I have the time to show you the web page but here you have the link if you want to take a look another one which I found very interesting was the effort that Eden has done to to face the challenges of the pandemic and one of them was precisely on design and management assessments for online learning there are other webinars related to the topic that I just brought this because I think it's relatively important to see which research and practices are done on this question of assessment in the different environments another aspect that I want to mention about the future is this question of introducing in this case facial recognition this is something that it's already happening for some years in some schools some experiences in China and with the University Stanford they are working with Stanford also on this tool that identifies the emotions using facial recognition so they can adjust their teaching in accordance with the reactions that may be positive or negative but it is somehow something that I do personal is when I look at the faces of the students I think I can understand if they are listening if they are understanding if they have questions etc so this is done artificially and that may be a big change for many classrooms another another aspect that I would like to mention in terms of assessment is the question of using artificial intelligence there is a block by this Bernard Maher that you can you can consult to see real examples of pick of the and pick take a look at the future and this is one company that it's already providing with a tech cooperation that it's all employing artificial intelligence not to evaluate the students but to help them mentoring and individualizing their learning as a function of their answers to the homeworks or whatever assessment mode is done so this is also probably an interesting aspect and I'm coming to the end of my presentation I think that this question of assessment is probably facilitated by the materials and and the tools that we have now available all the technologies I think it can be universal so we can work with anyone is accessible to everyone and it facilitates dialogue I think one of the things during the pandemic was that I managed to talk with each one of my students in a really deep way so this is a personal experience of course but I think it's possible and I've seen examples of that happening of course the information is now available and can be made useful for learning and the most important part is this personalization of the assessment and of course teaching is also should be personalized but the assessment I think it's more important because we are all different we have different learning styles and different behaviors and we should try to adjust our assessments to each one and this is my last slide addressing a little bit what was the topic of this panel we are assisting to this uber learning you learn how you want and when you want and just specifically what you need this is something that will happen more in the future and we will have a pulverization of learning materials these nanomodules micromodules and also the books which are neither of those but they also exist but in any case we will have a diversity of options but the point that I want to make you that I think you could reflect is that probably the future of university and teachers should be the accreditation and validation we will be probably crediting and validating conferences and learning outcomes acquired by participants but we will do more and more of this activity we will probably we will also be involved in a lot of guidance for learners we will probably not teach as much as we are doing it right now but we will guide them to so they can learn we will mentor Diana mentioned that the mentoring I worked in a project some years ago about the creation of a professional in education which was the facilitator they were not teachers they were not learners they were not technicians they would just facilitate the learning with the materials and the professor in charge so it was an interesting project with an interesting idea probably that will happen my my collection is that I was in a company that had six million learners online 60 you can imagine in rich country and he had about 900 staff one third of the staff was marketing staff another third was the production and the other third were the facilitators were the ones that were after each student and working with them so they will not fail they will not quit so bear in mind that's probably something that will exist more and more at universities and finally I think education as it is will become a commodity I'm sure that although some of us consider it as a social good it is more and more an economic good and that's it thank you very much and that's the end of my presentation thank you so much Alfredo very valuable information you shared today with us there are a couple of questions for you in the Q&A section and I would like for to ask one of them now it's from Alastair Krillman our colleague so if we use commercial AI applications with students how do we guarantee that those companies do not mine and exploit the student data this is a question I have also heard in several discussions especially about proctoring in E-assessment so what's your opinion on this Alfredo? Well we have to see the contracts I have in the past contracts that were not ethically acceptable so I read them and I said no you cannot use it but the point of using student data can also be how do I say anonymous you can supply data that is anonymous let me tell you also another story I'm old so I have some stairs to tell I was once in a conference in Stanford with one of the founders of Corsair Andrew Legu and he was mentioning what Corsair was what the deal they started etc and one of the persons in the audience this was in 2016 one of the persons in the audience asked them so what's your business model why do you put those courses online for free etc etc and he said information we we have about five terabytes of information each day and this was in 2016 and that's our business model because they sell the information but of course we as responsible for the students we have to be careful in in keeping let's say the data anonymous as much as possible but there's data in terms of for instance how many times you look at the slide in Corsair that was the research of Dilenburg in in Lausanne he had PhD students how students PhD students work on how students were behaving in a Corsair module you know how much time they were spending on each page etc etc so those things can be anonymous or not it depends on what you are doing but of course we have to be careful I agree with Alastair that we have to keep it as confidential as possible as and personal let's let's put it this way and personal thank you for this opinion I know this is one of the main reasons why many universities are resistant in in partnering with the proctoring companies we we now reach the Q&A section of of this session and we still have time for questions and there were several related to quality and this will be my first question to the three of you so in in these past two years there were tons of material built tons of resources educational resources created specifically for online education and there are questions about how do we ensure the quality of these resources what types of frameworks should we use and I am asking you now if you have already such a types of frameworks and methodologies in your universities or you are aware of such methodologies of good practices of assuring quality and I will start with Edmondo if if you please thank you very much Vlad just I would like to answer to your question obviously but I would like to to extend and lead more about my contribution because I think that I don't meet all the criteria all the expectation that only participants have about this panel because I focus more in a professional association in the role to help to develop new practices new digital practices for for the university so I would like to talk to resume very briefly which kind of project I am working now in this moment but about your question about your question that is how to ensure the quality of the material so I think that obviously the orientation of for to manage this kind of problem is to to make efforts in order to curate all this material so obviously if we are focusing in a in a close environment like a master university for instance about the dependency on innovation there is a team of experts that review all the materials that after they were offering to the to the students but this is a close environment I think that we have more ambitious and if we want to to use open resources that you can find in other repositories do you have to access to to to with repositories with with confidence in order that this is the case that we were looking for in our in our association that obviously we have to to look for partnerships with other organizations that provide open repositories with very high quality materials so I think that we have these both approaches more in a close environment but if you want to be more ambitious or only please go to the with reputation repositories that with confident partners that organize that host this kind of resources okay this is my question my answer to the question but if you let me at the end of the panel when any moment only two minutes in order to resume my the project that my group is involved in my university so I think that I can help I can support the objectives of this. Sure and I will be happy to do so just we finish this question and then then I will give you those minutes to present your current work so about the thank you Edmundo for your answer I agree that repositories are a solution in in in some in some sorts Diana I saw that you already answered in in writing but if you can briefly answer this also orally please. Yes I think it's quite important to look at repositories and to create repositories at international level and probably one of the things which the new digital education hub which the European Commission is building is exactly this in fact to be honest I'm a strong advocate of open education practices and tools and especially in terms of software because I keep saying you can have a practice of open education and at core to believe strongly into that but if the tools which you are using in every day or also in your university of in education there are proprietary tools what is the model which you will give to the students what the students will learn how you can encourage practices of open education and then give them to work in tools which are only based on that so this is why I kept hoping that for example moodle which initiated about three years ago to create the moodle map which was the plan exactly this to give you an interface an open source and free interface worldwide if it's possible where you can easily put open I mean any resource or guide or things which you have and or at least even a link to that tag it and then create it available for everybody unfortunately it's still not available it's not an easy task to do that and something like open OA comments for example it's doing it but the digital education hub probably will do that at least in Europe hopefully it was just launched as an idea and probably it was going to be built up I strongly believe that beside all of these you know great projects especially in European Union on which we are part of beside the normal dissemination or awareness raising which we are doing if we will be able to find them in an easier interface or platform than the Erasmus plus results platform everybody's life in Europe education system would have been much more easier in the last one year and a half and probably also in the future thank you Diana quality is always a difficult topic to discuss especially since depending on the university and the country we define quality in different ways yes Alfredo if you can also jump in in this topic how do we evaluate what quality framework should we use again with a story in the end of the 90s we had a project on quality of open and distance learning and we were in Budapest in a meeting and one of the partners was Jeff van den Braden I don't know if you know him but he was from the Catholic of Louven and he arrived at the meeting I remember we were outside and he came with about 10 publications and he put the 10 publications on top of the table and said these are all manuals on quality of open and distance learning I don't want to do one again like this because there are many there are many studies on quality what was called open and distance learning in those days but it's now called learning on my money etc but as my view on the question of quality is that the open education resources will have quality if they fit the purpose if they really make people learn and that again is what I mentioned in my presentation you have to do assessments you have to verify if they have quality if they provide the learning outcomes they say they will so this is my suggest verify if they they provide the learning outcomes and competences as announced thank you yes please please if I can just quickly say something about all of this discussion about quality I certainly believe that having a sort of evaluation framework and everything which you need to validate especially for something which you are using directly in formal education or for competence validation in a degree it's very important but I believe quite a lot I'm how to say I'm a computer scientist my origin or something like that I'm not an educator so but I strongly believe in the theories of connective pandagogies and collective wisdom so if I strongly believe also in terms of our resources which I answer to the question that if 100 plus students use it and consider it useful that's the quality evaluation which you need and which you want if a framework and a standard is somehow respected then you don't need to validate it too much or something like that because the market the students will will define if it's good or not and they will use it or not and if they will use it and if they find anything anywhere which is useful for them believe it they will share it between them and they will use it even more probably than your own resources it doesn't matter how much quality evaluation you have done to that so I'm pretty sure I'm speaking a truth now a very how to say painful truth sometimes that we need to live also in the education for the students to decide and to choose what they're using and how they're using thank you for for this Diana I would like now to as I promise to give Edmundo a few minutes to showcase what he prepared and then I still have one last question for for the three of you in regards to the future so Edmundo please okay thanks Vlad I think that it takes only two minutes yes in the presentation I present I I show several tools in order to do practices if obviously if if if you have the opportunity to use a platform or a half of resources you have opportunity to promote to to develop practices with your students in order to do several things no for instance I say I put that as some as example in my presentation a contest of all year obviously you can organize several practices with your students in order to co-produce resources open resources that can be reviewed by other people okay about my personal experience my current experience my current contribution that I can provide in this panel about my group is the participation in several Erasmus plus projects so the first one is that can I can have a global picture about the objectives of these projects the first one could be the project that is called Stensoft okay this is this is a project that try to organize all the skills and all the competencies about soft skills so but oriented to several target groups not only obviously with all the levels of qualifications pre-university and vocational education trainings are obviously higher higher education students obviously you will have we will have to develop micro training programs micro credentials as Alfredo said in other initiatives etc so and the and the approach using open educational resources so we will have to catalog and to evaluate the quality of the resources another one is a project that tried to create environment awareness about the use about the creation of environment awareness towards plants and greenery educated young people and the teachers using ecological learning spaces this is another Erasmus plus that is called these pills my institution in my university we have we have institutional we are in a participation participating in another Erasmus plus project that is called ELISA ELISA aims to transform European higher education while strengthening links between engineering and society we're inventing the european engineer concept concept making a real impact of society using the 23rd agenda for sustainable development of the and the SDGs etc i am personally my group is participating in one of the communities that we have that institution has created as the entrepreneurship entrepreneurship in my institutions very key skills competence that try to use had to that is promoted to use in all the studies program so and about professionalism i think that this is another area that we are participating and try to reduce the gap between the demands of the market and the academic learning outcomes that we can generate okay this is a summary i don't want to take more time for this interesting panel but i want to try to explain a little more about our activities in my university thank you thank you Mundo it's always difficult when we are involved in so many activities to decide which to present in one discussion and i'm very happy that you showcase now so many projects and i will i am curious to learn more and we'll look after this on the web for them i would like to finish this discussion with the with the last question so what is the future bringing and one of one of the theories is that the future is hybrid and now my question to you is the following have you designed or do you know colleagues who designed a hybrid class and how is how is this designed practically how do you recommend our participants to design a hybrid class in the near future and now i will go to alfredo since since we have the mundo just speaking and then i will come back to you alfredo about the hybrid yes yeah i mean personally i've been doing that for 10 years or more so i've used the mudo we used blackboard at the beginning and then mudo so it's been that for many years where i combine let's say the interaction with the students virtually and let's say the discussion and the presentation of the contents personal so i think that the most important in the in the in the personal interaction that we cannot reproduce online is the is the the personal interaction looking in the eyes and understanding the emotions and the reactions that you cannot do online i've tried it i i did exams online many years ago and it's not the same thing you don't see the body you don't know if the student is comfortable with the answer etc so i think that we we can do a lot online but it's not the same thing as the physical interaction and i i take advantage of all the digital support i can get to be honest in my because the students like it it's organized it's it's it's permanent it's um how do i say clear even their answers when they write they have to type it so you can read what they type and write it so there are things that are good physically present there are things that are good online and i think we should combine both as much as possible i'm not the radical in favor of one or the other i i'm i think we can combine fruitfully the two options thank you so much that's that's also my opinion a little bit of the both worlds so to get the best of the both worlds and i think that's the way to go forward thank you arfredo diana what is your input i i know for for a fact that you have designed the hybrid classes uh i i have been together with you in them so please uh yes i i need to say that i'm probably i've run hybrid classes even before the pandemic times which gave me a bit of experience blood is very nice to remember that when he was a student also some years ago i will not say so many um i used to that was the first thing which i've done i recorded the audio and also the video of my class so it doesn't matter what i was doing in the class i mean it's exactly in the class that was recorded and made available for the students and maybe one anecdote also which i know from blood he used to listen to my classes driving so when he was driving around the city or having different going around as a student he used to listen to my classes which i consider personally um not not very very good for me i kept saying that this will probably uh he hated me in that moment and that's the way of doing it so that's just a small anecdote before but going seriously now um we use um so the method which i will recommend or probably which is coming from my experience is that try to use a lot of pre-recording of the things which you can do so if you really want to deliver strongly some message and some knowledge record them before record them easily now it's not that difficult even in zoom either you do a presentation or a lab or anything and then you just record yourself explaining over that then use h5p or any interactive tool by adding even bookmarks or questions or anything there on that video and make it available in your learning management system for the students either to see before or either to see during the class and over the class because hybrid normally in especially now in 2021 means not necessarily that you make available for the students and resources but that you teach simultaneously sometimes in class and then off class the thing which for example in our university we done as approach even that we use that only for three weeks because we moved uh after that again on full online teaching in my university as you probably are aware of the very bad situation with COVID now in the fourth wave in Romania we've been hit more than in the previous three waves and um this is very unfortunate so our university for a month almost now three weeks and a half is teaching fully online but initially also now and also in June we use this hybrid method that uh you will do the class especially lab works with students in the lab those which are there you will record that uh even sometimes by phone by a simple phone installed in uh on a small tripod or something like that and it will be recorded and then you will use also the students to record small examples of the labs and then you will put that together and available to the student and then you repeat that class only online and you are focusing only for the online students because we had students which were not able to come to the in-class meeting so my experience and my suggestion is do not mix them in the same time if you really want to do a quality education in engineering mainly especially in engineering but even that it's a duplicated time our university pulled a lot of financial resources to that so they paid a double time of the professors to allow them to teach the students which are physically exactly in the class and focusing on them with the recording which is then available for further evaluation and use and also by the online students and then to repeat that class and especially the labs for the online students using different methods and methodology thank you diana when you say it like this it sounds quite simple it's not in practice i can say from my own example it's not but after you get the use of it it really gets uh it really begins to be better and easy yeah thank you you need to have you need to have a strong support unit and a lot of training if you invest as a university in training your teachers and also your students then you get the results indeed and we encourage all of you to to talk with your administration in your in your universities to invest in in this area edmundo have you got any experience with the hybrid design or what are your thoughts on this for the future yes i think that we are leaving we had experience in my university all the teachers all the educators have experience using hybrid model now because there was a big effort in order to to install in our rooms cameras all the equipment needed to to this kind of model but as i said before i think that in my in our case in the technical university in Madrid it's a very presensual modality is very the main feature is the modality is the presensual modality we are trying to go to come back as soon as possible to the to the modality in person so obviously all the experience that we have learned in the last month there will be very useful in order to exploit the new technologies at the new digital competences as educators we have obviously but i think that that we can address all these competences for to attend the specific needs of groups that require specific attendance or specific attention you know that people that is that has problem to attend temporarily temporarily has problem to attend to to the classes etc so this is the direct application that we are doing to to all the lessons that we have learned obviously we are in the process of the of the transformation digital of the digital transformation in our competences there will be useful but in this moment i think that we will come back to a very distinction between online and essential universities thank you and this process of the transformation as we have also seen in in i saw in the chat some comments about the necessity of well planning this the comments were about the hybrid classes but i can extend this need of well planning for the digital transformation which we are in the process of doing now in our own universities i thank our honorable and distinguished speakers for attending and accepting our invitation to to be a part of Eden's sixth european online and distance learning week i thank all the participants for your interest your valuable input in the chat the questions i'm sorry that we didn't get the time to answer all the questions and i remind you that we still have until the 10th of november events organized by Eden so be sure to register to to all of them thank you everyone and have a nice day thank you