 Thank you, everyone. So good afternoon for our colleagues from Toronto and the Americas. Good evening to the people from Europe and Africa. And I guess it's a very early morning in Taipei. So I hope some of them, some of our colleagues from Taipei can join us. So my name is Jacques Daug and I'm from the French Digital University in Economics and Management. And I will be joined by two colleagues, our President Christophe Fournier and Deborah Arnold, who will be presenting with me. Christophe Fournier is the President of our Digital University and works for the University of Montpellier in South-Eastern France. And Deborah is the Coordinator of National and International Projects in Research and Development. So I'll just hand off the floor to Christophe to tell you some few words about our organization and about what we do. Thank you, Jacques, so much for introducing me. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening for everyone. I'm so happy as a President of this Digital University to give you words to introduce Onege. We will first talk about the University Numerique, which is Onege is specialized on economics and management. And this is a public, an association of different public universities with different engineering and management school. And the main goal is to share some open resources and courses, but also to conduct and try to develop and follow some pedagogical innovation through digital transformation. So Onege is part of a more aggregated organization, which is the University Numerique, which also covers other open educational resources dealing with humanities, technology, science and engineering, healthcare management and sports and also sustainable development. Okay, this operator is part of a ministry for higher education, research and innovation. And this is by that way that we receive an annual grant. And we are mandated to represent French higher education in several international bodies and the organization dealing with open education. And among these different organizations, you have UNESCO, Open Education Global, ACDI, among others. So based on that, we have several open educational resources, around 1100 courses and resources, which are open and of course for only non-commercial use. So we have license, Creative Common License, with house attribution and non-commercial use. Sure of the quality of the quality of our resources, which are proposed, we've got scientific committee, which are reading and examining the resources on several point of view from a pedagogical point of view, of course, but also scientific, technical and legal criteria. And to create 1,100 courses, we have around 200 offers. After that, we've got different partnership to and this has increased deeply with the COVID-19 crisis. Okay, first, different partner in France like the FNAGE, which is a foundation for management education, dealing with both public and private business school. Another network is IAE France. This is NAIC work to join a French public business school. Business school could be either in public in the private sector or in public university and this is the goal of IAE. We have different of European higher education network like Eden, EADTU or Ellen Network with Politecnico di Milano, Universitat de Bremen and University of Dendi, among others. In the sector of open education, we've got different partner like Open Education Global International Conceal for Open and Distance Education, ICDE, UNESCO of course, Dynamic Coalition for Open Education Resources and we've got many agreement and cooperation with virtual university, especially in Africa like Congo, Congo, Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal. Okay, and after, of course, we are dealing with the Ministry of Higher Education and Research of this country, mainly this country, French-speaking country in Western Central Africa. So this is a first view about our digital university. So we'll hand off the floor to Deborah. Okay, thank you very much, I can and thank you Christophe for the introduction. Yes, so here you can see that we're not only looking at the production and the dissemination of open educational resources, but we're also engaged in a series of projects at national and European level. You can see a few examples here. What we're going to do is focus on the first one because the topic today is micro-credentials, but we're also very active in open virtual mobility, work around soft skills, work around quality as well. So let's take a closer look at what we're doing in the ECHO project, which is the European Credit Clearing House for opening up education. We called it the Credit Clearing House when we started, but we're thinking now that a more appropriate name is the Credential Clearing House. So this is a European Erasmus Plus project. We started just over a year ago, and what we're trying to do is facilitate the endorsement and appropriation of open online and flexible higher education through increasing trust in technology-enabled credentials. We're looking at credentials at all levels, but the focus of what I'm going to be talking to you about right now is the micro-credential level. In order to do that, we're looking at quality criteria, what should be contained in a digital credential, not just from a technical point of view, but really from a usability and user point of view, what is the most relevant information for the different stakeholders, for the learners, for the institutions, and for employers. On the institutional recognition side, we're developing what we're calling a Model Credit Recognition Agreement, the MCRA. We've got lots of acronyms, so you've got them here, and this we like to call it a fast-track solution to helping institutions and helping learners get recognition of prior learning through it, for example, and we've been looking very, very closely at the different processes that take place and looking at making people's lives easier with support for that process. We've also taken a deep look at the way learning opportunities are described, looking at MOOC platforms, looking at institutional websites, to develop a showcase catalogue of learning opportunities, and to try and draw out what is the most useful information, what do learners need to see in these descriptions before they enroll or sign up for a particular learning opportunity. We've got the whole technical side to the credentials, and all this comes together in the ecosystem or the ecosystem, which is going to bring all of this together, providing services to a network of different stakeholders. So if we look at what we've coming up next in the project, next week we're launching a series of public consultations. So this is an open invitation to anybody here who wants to get involved and to contribute to shaping the future of what these should look like, focusing on our first two outputs, so the information that a microcredential should include and testing our fast-track solution. So you can drop me an email if you want to get involved, we'll be sending out personal invitations, or you can comment on the OE Global Connect under our presentation section, and I'll get in touch with you there. But let's now have a look at the bigger picture in Europe, because the work we're doing in Echo fits within this wider context of the European Qualifications Framework, and there's an awful lot of work being going on in Europe to map national qualification frameworks together. The European MOOC consortium has done a great deal of work in developing a common microcredential framework, so that that supports mobility and opportunities for learners. We've got the European Multilingual Classification of Skills and Competencies, ESCO, which is gradually becoming more and more known, and we think that there should be much more take up of that. And then finally, the flagship European Initiative of Europass, which is much more than just your online CV, it's a whole, again, ecosystem of learning opportunities, work opportunities and so on, and will be developing digital credentials as well. I'm conscious of the time, so I'm going to go on quite quickly now. I don't promise to be an expert on what's going on outside Europe, but it's interesting to look. There's an example of a recent report here, which dates back about a year now. These were some of the things that were found in the United States. Interesting to see that MOOCs only provide 1% of credentials, and that there is very little consistency in the way that skills, competencies and microcredentials are used. If we look as well, when people talk to us about microcredentials, they say, you should look at what's going on in New Zealand. So we can see the example of the New Zealand microcredential framework here, where there's a sector-wide system of recognised microcredentials from everything to fitting a kitchen, to dealing with trauma, and lots of other topics. So this is something very interesting to explore. We also have to be careful about some of the criticisms that are addressed to microcredentials. And I found this very, very interesting article, the reference you've got here, where we've got to be careful about not reducing higher learning to this hard skills and technical competences. And I think that's been very much addressed in previous sessions here at OE Global. When you think that the ESCO framework does contain descriptions of values and attitudes as well as soft skills and the hard skills, I think that's something that we need to be really, really careful of paying attention to. And think about educating the whole person and not breaking things down into these measurable chunks. So being aware of the criticisms, yes, addressing them and be happy to engage in conversation with anybody around this. And I think that's all from me. Yes, back to you, Jank. Thank you, Deborah. I would like to introduce to our colleagues a new initiative that has been launched early this month because it was launched on the 1st of November. Actually, the work had been started one year ago. It's about an international council on badges and credentials that involves a very large set of stakeholders. They are very diverse in terms of geographical spread because they spread from Canada, the US, and the Americas to Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They also be diverse in terms of focus. They are organizations that are focused on international standardization, others than professional providers, others that are education providers. And so all of these organizations are involved in one way or another in this initiative to promote the use and quality of badges and credentials. So the purpose of this network of networks is to ensure that we have a holistic view of badges and credentials and how they are used for individuals, organizations, and society as a whole. So we're trying to promote a group collaboration of very diverse actors and we want to demonstrate the feasibility of current projects in the fields of badges and credentials and how we can adapt them to various geographical contexts, professional contexts, or also depending on the size of organizations. So this is also a call to action because we have a number of working groups that are already involving the stakeholders I've mentioned. One about the micro-certification that connects higher education to workforce. So this is about how higher education can go to the corporate world with understandable and recognizable credentials. And we have to move around the other way, going from the corporate world to gain recognition of training activities by business schools. We also have a working group that has not started yet in the foreign language skills, but we will be involving a number of universities and companies at least in France and Africa. There is a Humanitarian Sector Badging Initiative and we have an ongoing work in the Council and Durham Civil Society to develop a large-scale framework for badges and credentials. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we'll be developing activities in Africa in order to promote the use of credentials, to promote the use of open educational resources, and more globally promote the development and improvement of educational initiatives in Africa. Can mention the work done with the EPICA project and also the work done by a group of virtual universities in French-speaking Africa in collaboration with UNESCO. So I'd like to thank you for your attention and would like also to draw your attention to another session that we'll be holding Wednesday, slightly one hour later, which is about the work we are doing on the UNESCO recommendation for OER and how we are going about international cooperation in that work. Thank you very much for your attention and of course we are open to questions and discussions, as mentioned most notably by Deborah. Thank you very much. There's a question in the chat here. Can you say more about the work in Africa or point to it? Oh, so there are two aspects to the work we are doing in Africa. The first one I mentioned will be the focus of our next presentation. It's about we're working with the ministries and the virtual universities on at least the level of three countries each time in order to see how we can promote the use of OER from an operational point of view. It's difficult in a given country to have a face to face the ministry which holds a large power over a virtual university. So working with UNESCO and two other countries makes sense. So this is what we are going to do and replicate and we'll do other things also and we're also trying to launch concurrently the work for badges and credentials. I'm not necessarily the expert on that part of the work but I can point to you and give you a contact if you can give me your contact email and I'll send you the information. Done. So I guess one of the questions raised by Deborah was is the framework, the frameworks we used in Europe, are they scalable, are they too bureaucratic from a corporate or North American-centric point of view? Is that a question to me or is that a question to the audience Shaik? Both I would say. Perhaps you can start. Well I couldn't speak for the North American point of view because I'm not directly involved in actually implementing this kind of thing. I can speak from the European point of view and I think we do sometimes find that they are quite not not bureaucratic but there's a lot that you need to get to grips with in the background and again not talking about the technical point of view but really just the whole way learning and higher education is organised and the whole recognition aspect as well which is very very complex and also quite difficult to change mindsets as we're finding but this is part of what we're doing trying to be at the forefront of some of these activities. So I think the session is coming to an end so thank you very much everyone for being here and we'll be available for discussion in the which you can reply on our session posts and we'll also have another session and also a chat session next Thursday. Thank you again everyone and thank you very much Open Education Global. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.