 webinar and to organize this and also to all the participants, of course, which are there. I think that probably some are still out there and trying to find their way through the door. But we'll be then with us in a few minutes. You are here in the webinar on line between informal and formal learning. I will spell out the title in a few minutes, a bit more precisely and at length. This is taking place, actually, the fourth time, the third time, actually, the third year that Eden, which is a European distance and e-learning network, is hosting the European distance learning week. And we do that in cooperation with the United States Distance Learning Association, the USDA. Have a look if you don't know this organization, very interesting. Also look at the Eden website if you want to know more about the Eden network, the European distance and e-learning network. It's Eden-online.org and inform yourself about our activities. My name is Ulf Ehlers. I'm a professor for education management and lifelong learning. So I'm an education guy. I'm an education activist, a professor of education. And I have worked my entire professional life dealing with questions of digital learning, e-learning, online learning, internationally, quality management for online learning specifically, and then lately as a vice president of my own university for six years also with a question how actually universities need to develop and to adopt a future model of higher education, which will be suitable for preparing graduates. And in our own research actually, we did a lot of research on what we call future skills or skills in the next society. And that's very interesting because we are going to organizations and we are asking them what actually will the future workplace hold and what are the skills the future employees are needing. And most organizations tell us the time of knowledge is not over, but seems to be becoming a little bit less relevant next to skills and attitudes specifically like self-organization. So it seems that education and professional development of the future and maybe of today as well already has to do a lot with the ability of individuals in the workplace in society to educate themselves constantly. Lifelong of course, constantly and the line between those contexts and scenarios which are formal trainings for example and those scenarios in which education takes place in a non-formal, in an informal, maybe even in an incidental way seems to become more and more important. And of course now all organizations, all educational organizations, but all other also workplace related organizations are now challenged because somehow the way we thought about education and training and professional development so far might need to change for the future and need to take into account that no longer a standard formal degree is the only rule of the day but more and more education seems to be an episodic informal process throughout life. So that is what we decided to focus on in this week, the European Distance Learning Week. And today with our webinar and with that we greet you all again also those who have just joined us. We have with us Arina, I'm sorry but I'm usually only saying Arina and we have with us Sandra, Christina Softich, I will introduce you both later on in a bit more detail. We have with us from the Vittatas Magnus University. We have with us Alfredo Soera from the University of Porto. We have with us Ildiko Mazar from KIC Knowledge Innovation Center from Malta. And we have with us, I hope I pronounce it correctly, Zidre Tamolin from the Vittatas Magnus University to give presentations on recognition of valid and open learning, on validation of competencies from virtual non-formal or informal learning, on credentials, new forms of credentials and credentialing, small micro-credentials and how that can become reality in the future, and of online learners interactions and engagement into study processes. So, it is in a way a whole range of topics which we put onto the stage today which are dealing with this new form of learning, the line between formal and non-formal learning, formal and informal learning and how educational concepts can look like, how recognition processes can look like and how organizations need to react to that. I'm very happy that you experts are all with us, that you all are giving your presentations today. For the presentations, I have here my watch, my clock and I will do the timekeeping. Everybody has maximum 15 minutes, 12 to 15 minutes for your presentation and after that we are going to have a five minute question and answer session and to all participants, which I again greet very, very warmly here from Germany where I am sitting today, I would like to ask you already during the presentations, you can type into the chat your questions or also later on ask for the mic, that's of course possible. So, very welcome, very warm welcome to everybody again and with that, I would like to ask for the first presentation from Irina and from Sandra. I would just like to say a few words of introduction. Irina is the president of Eden, so we are very proud to have the president of the European Distant and E-Learning Network in person and live today with us. Irina is the president of Eden and she is, so to speak, at home, the director of innovative studies of the Institute of Innovative Studies that we taught at Magnus University in Lithuania. She's been working in the field very, very many, many years, has extensive experience in technology enhanced learning. She is an activist for distance education and for open education. I know her personally as an activist and I'm very happy to have her here. Sandra is an assistant director for education and user support at the University of Zagreb. It's a truly international collaboration in this presentation today. Sandra's work is focused on monitoring and fostering e-learning implementation in higher education institutions, which we all know is not easy and is a very challenging task to do. And she has also, of course, extensive experiences through appointments in European working groups, working group on digital skills and on digital education, learning, teaching and assessment. And so I would like to welcome both of you, Irina and Sandra, and ask you for your presentation. 12 to 15 minutes, keep it short so that we have still some time for questions. Your presentation carries a title Re-Open, Recognition of Valid and Open Learning, Impact and Established Collaboration. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much for this kind of presentation. And I must say, your introduction always brings us closer to the audience to start with. So we decided today to talk about an international project that is just finished five days ago, actually. But this is the result of the work that has been carried out for two years and the partnership under Erasmus Plus KT32. The project is called Re-Open and the title is visible on the first slide. I'll give you the link in the chat to the website. We decided not to introduce the project and what we did during the project. But to talk about the most maybe important thing is the impact that can be reached by such kind of project and established collaboration. Not only with formal consortium, but also with other stakeholders and how important they are. Yesterday, during the opening panel on Open and Distance Learning, we heard several very important statements from experts. One of them was that training and specifically bringing and disseminating and sharing, understanding what the system and innovation is about, makes impact. So we skip training, we skip understanding and how we do it, but we go towards impacting immediately. So we wanted to achieve, first of all, six indicators demonstrating that this impact is reached and we will shortly, very briefly explain how. So you see here six numbered items, increased sense of initiative and entrepreneurship and professional collaboration. I should add here of all stakeholders involved in the developing the link between formal and non-formal learning. Increased level of digital and other components of teachers and trainers through developing open learning non-formal curriculum, through applying digital badges to track learning paths and through recognizing open learning in formal curriculum. So the item is to achieve better understanding and recognition of skills and qualifications in Europe and beyond. Four goes for better understanding of interconnections between formal and non-formal education, vocational education and training and other forms of learning can live a much better perspective. Five, to a better understanding of practices, policies and systems in education and training and six more strategic and integrated use of my field. So in the reopened project the first impact achieved which is namely increased sense of initiative, entrepreneurship and professional collaboration was achieved in our estimation by training teachers and trainers who participated in the development of non-formal open courses. They became emotional owners of the new validated professional development courses and stakeholders in the project to resolve and after they developed non-formal courses being a part of formal curriculum provided as well in their organization, they gave testimonies and participating in creating key scenario descriptions. They are all provided online at the project website and we will give to you the link at the end of the presentation. I think that was a good method to achieve the first type of impact. The second type of impact which we call increased level of digital and other competencies and we think this is very important in developing the strategy and the links between formal and non-formal education and transition towards non-formal education and its recognition in the formal curriculum. We of course focus on developing an increasing level of digital and other competencies among teachers. So again training, training, training but at the same time the link of recognition processes and tools should be in short. So it was very important that in the project, in the open, we had teachers trained and we made link among different recognition schemes. Digital badges, paper certificates, your past mobility certificate and of course this helped us to make competent recognition and give evidence on how future learners can also benefit from different schemes of recognition. The third impact which is better understanding and recognition of skills and qualifications in Europe and beyond was to use the website as a tool to explain, first of all to negotiate and to agree upon the key definitions that we use at least for the title of the project and the concept of the project and the idea of the project. So what open learning is, what open and online learning is and what validation is, what recognition is and what recognition of valid and open learning is. The idea was inspired by joint research center reports on validated open-mood based learning in June 2016 and we kept to the idea explaining on different scenarios and different definitions how we can use them in order to create solutions in our organizations that would be open learning for open online learning and valid online learning solutions. The fourth impact was to reach better understanding of interconnections in formal, non-formal education, vocational training and other forms of learning can live on market respectively. And actually the target groups in the project already brought quite a number of challenges to what consortium members. Because the target groups involved see that lifelong learning in higher education institutions, companies. Yes, thank you Irina. I hope you can hear me. Well, I was reading again today our training materials to prepare for the webinar and I was again very nicely surprised how good quality they are because actually I'm going to talk about the part for the educators. So lots of us are involved in producing some learning material modules and courses whether it's face-to-face or online. So we have a knowledge but actually when to prepare some open online course you have to know some additional information in order to make it afterwards possible to recognize and validate. And this is why we in the project used the system module and in this system we prepared the training materials which I invite you all to read and to look at because they are really good information there and also based on these training materials and the templates we prepared we developed this case status as an example how can one open online course look like. So first we had the course templates where the information about the course is put and I think it's very important to make this available to participants in order that they know what they are enrolling into. Also in order to know how much time they will have to spend in such a course what is their tasks, what is expected from them, assessment strategy, possibility for certification and credentialization and also link to some former curriculum and types of Creative Commons licenses. So in order that it's really visible and clear what this course or model is about there is this template which helps the teacher to prepare the course but also the learner to be aware of all the issues regarding the course before entering to it. Next thing is the learning plan which I think is very, very important whether it's mentored course or self-learning course. So in the learning plan person, the teacher, write information about learning outcomes of the course and the schedule and assignments and topics which are going to be done into this course and you can see it's very important that for assignment it's clear, there are clear guidelines what is taken into account and how much weight special some activities have. In that way the person have clear understanding what is expected from him or her at what time and what will be the final result of their work. Also the third issue is learning agreement which is very important because when you have these open online courses you often aware yourself that you start taking some course and drop out or take it I would say not so serious but with learning agreement the person besides that it's he or she that is taking course not someone else and that they understand what is their responsibilities in the course. So in order to be successful in taking this course. So there are other possibilities when you take an online course that someone can verify that it's he or she who is taking the course but I think taking upon the person to verify that they have taken this course seriously that they assigned this learning agreement is very important. And also our outreach is more than 1200 teachers and trainers as well as employers and education providers who were reached through our consortia side events with dissemination. What is very important that the teachers and trainers from consortia gained competencies that kills on developing of these continuous professional development courses and that more than 1000 of potential learners were introduced to them developing using open non-formal learning solution through our dissemination channels. So like Facebook, social media website or LinkedIn and also we had our newsletter which we also distributed via our communication channels. Also I would like to mention as well that we have developed the template for the quality assurance of the course for the teachers to check if they have performed everything which is needed for the course or maybe to have some peer-reviewing that someone else is checking, evaluating this course. So I think that these elements provide a really good base for someone preparing an open online course. And I think that yes, and the one last thing, ICT platform we have prepared, it's free for use so it can be also that person can take a free copy of this platform. You can see on our webpage there's a form you can fill in and you can have this platform with already all courses and training materials for your use within your institution. So this exploitation is really, really good because some institutions do not have possibilities to develop their own platforms or prepare their own courses but they can use already what is existing. So I'm going back to Alina. It's important for all these different levels of organizations because we thought that we must meet the challenge and if we look at the society and how the society is learning nowadays we come to meet all these people at the same scale and in the same context. So we thought that it is very important to go for a more complex idea development and we think that we actually reached this impact as well. We first of all linked every non-formal course developed in the protein with a formal curriculum in formal education provider organizations and in addition to employer. So we met with employers and discussed how the competences that are gained through the learning in non-formal course can meet the needs of the employer and continuous professional development in that organization. We used different tools for better understanding of practices, policies and systems in education and training. So when we had dissemination and multiple events every time we brought these tools to the target groups and we saw this... I, Irina and Sandra, a very, very interesting presentation of a project which the results are online available and as you heard you can also ask for using them in your own university to start open study processes. So very interesting, thank you. We have a few minutes for questions if there are any from the floor. Either you type them into the chat or you ask for the microphone and then ask your question. Please. Okay, so far that is not the case. I'm just waiting for allowing time to ask questions. Meanwhile, I can ask to change the presentations already to the second presentation. If we have no questions, I would like to directly go over to the second presenter but not without thanking again Irina and Sandra for your presentation which was very clear and very impressive for presenting the results of the re-open project. So congratulations for the successful closure of the project and thank you very much. So we come to our second presenter which is Alfredo Soero from the University of Porto. He is talking about a very important subject as well. The presentation carries the title validation of competencies from virtual, non-formal or informal learning processes. I'm adding a proposal. So we are asked to think together with Alfredo. It is a proposal he is presenting and it is on validation of competencies. It is a very interesting and very much needed topic actually. Alfredo is already also very connected to the Eden family. He is an Eden senior fellow. He is a civil engineer by education. He is an academic director and vice president of civil engineering and a pro-vector of the University of Porto. The founder of U-CAN, of RECLA and of other networks I think I cannot tell all the different activities and initiatives you have actually started. So with that I would like to give over to Alfredo Soero from the University of Porto. I would like to have you here and talk about validation of competencies from virtual, non-formal and informal learning. And now the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you Wolf for the kind words. It is a pleasure for me to be here. I was a little bit late but I had classes and students had a test so in the nearby hours it was not easy to finish. I would like to thank Sandra also for organizing this event and Eden of course to have this learning week. I think it's going to be a very good repository of presentations for the future. At least for me. So my presentation, my contribution is something that we have done with the engineers. So it is mostly on the engineering side and the project was coordinated by the German Engineering Association, VALDE or VDI and we have FEANI which is the Federation of how do I say the engineer organizations in Europe. So it was a very participated project and the intention like it is mentioned is that the one that is in the bottom, validation of competencies. Because engineers are very interested in validating the profiles of other engineers that not only those that travel but also those that work in each country or apply for a certain qualification. So this is very important as you know and this is a topic of today's seminar. It's something that it's coming to life of everyone and engineers do not escape. So we tried to study what was already done in other areas and in other projects and this is what I organized for this presentation. I have something on the relevance of lifelong learning and why we are doing this as a matter of fact I already said, sorry, what I wanted to say and then I'll talk about two of the projects, the virtual qualifications which was a project that tried to address the combination of virtual learning plus the qualifications of the European qualification framework and also the framework for the European higher education area. And I'll talk also about this specific project about engineers and I'll finish with some proposal or some ideas that we can discuss or address. So trying to move. Okay, how do I move this? Okay, it's here. Okay, so the role of lifelong learning I think that I mentioned there's a diversity of stakeholders that are interested in this question of validation of what people learning in formal and non-formal procedures and in this case, my focus is precisely on the professional associations. Certain countries have the profession regulated, some others don't, but in both cases the engineers need to have some kind of verification of their competencies and the updating of those competencies. Some countries also have mandatory updating of the competencies like Britain and Ireland and Italy now. Some others are voluntary like mine. Some others don't care like the Swedish, like Sweden. So there is a variety of scenarios in Europe but for all of them, from my point of view, for all of them this topic is very important. So that's why I brought it here. I think we might have a technical problem. There is no sound any longer. We will see if it can be fixed. We are waiting just for some moments. I cannot go on with the presentation. I'm not the expert. I'm afraid of this topic. Sorry. Now it's coming back. I'm back. Are you listening? We're here. I don't know what happened. Now you're back perfectly. I'm back. So what I was saying is that in two minutes I've gone past, so I have to speak quicker. The FEANI, which is this federation, is this engineering card where you record the initial studies. You record the employment and you also record the life-long learning achievements. And this is something that the professional engineering organizations use. As you can see, we have engineering education. We have the professional experience and the continuing professional development. So this is what is recorded for the engineers and how do you fit virtual learning like non-formal or informal learning into this process. And that's what we studied. Verkl, I don't know if Sandro was a partner. I don't remember. But this was a project where we tried to not only combine the virtual mobility but the qualification frameworks and having somehow common references for those that learn in different spaces and want their learning to recognize in a certain way. So there are some guides for teachers, organizations, universities. This is a relatively old project. The principles are still valid from my point of view. Now for the one that we use for the engineers in terms of non-formal and informal learning and you lost my image, so I'm going to share it again. Okay, there you go. We have tried to produce European guidelines. One of the things that is in the recommendation of this project, believe it or not, was a proposal for a European directive. We have European directives on so many things and we propose an European directive on validation of non-formal and informal learning. Somebody has to put some order in what happens and somehow make it more European. So that's one of the things that came out of this project. Another was the creation of observatories. There are certain organizations who record like EDEM. EDEM has it, you can also have observatories of this non-formal and informal learning with lots of materials that you can use. And one of the things that we underlined in the conclusions of the project is that we need evidences. If you cannot measure, then you cannot ensure quality. So you need to measure to have some quality. And in terms of the competences in this virtual environment, we need evidences. So we can measure what competences they acquire. There were some proposals on how to present evidences. There is a project that you can see, the Euro record, which was coordinated by University of Cambridge some years ago, but it's still valid. So that's why we use it. CVs, third-party reports. Of course, you need somebody from the outside to make an evaluation. That was something that Baldy, the German engineering association, was very interested in producing. And of course portfolios, mainly portfolios to present the competences. So the proposal is basically this. Like I said, for validation, we need four phases. Identification of the competences. Documentation to provide the evidences. Somebody has to verify it. And then somebody certifies it. So basically this is what is proposing this project with several steps. And we didn't invent anything. We just, like I mentioned, we took advantage of things that were done in the past by the different organizations. So, other things that are needed. And again, I'm talking about engineering organizations. For the engineering organizations, you need to provide information, guidance and counseling. Most of the engineers are not used to this. And I guess all the professionals or students are not used to these procedures yet. So this is something that is needed. Of course, we need to work with stakeholders. For instance, the companies, the enterprises, of course the universities, or higher education institutions. But there must be a coordination. And there must be standards in terms of learning outcomes. We must be very strict on how do we write the learning outcomes so we can have a quality assurance. Because anyone writes the learning outcomes of the training, either formal, informal or informal in different ways. And we need, somehow, some kinds of guidance. And again, the proposal for the directive, the European directive. And sorry for insisting, but I think that the academics and the professional organizations cannot get there. We need the commission to do something like they did with the CTS and the Erasmus and other directives. So here is a list of references. I'm not going to click. But you have lots of materials that we use to produce this report from OECD to the Euro portfolio project. We also provide some guidance. And you can, I think you will have access to this slide so you can check and make your own conclusions. And that's what I wanted to say. I think I respected the 10 minutes. And glad to be here again. And thank you, Wolf, and thank you, Sandra, for being here and organizing all this. So, Alfredo, thank you very much. It was a very, very, very interesting presentation with lots of references. And I encourage everybody who's listening to go to the references and have a look and take benefit of that. Thank you very much, Alfredo, for the presentation. Also for the timekeeping. Very, very good. And as you can read in the chat to all the participants, as you can read in the chat, all slides which you have seen here up to now and the ones we are going to show in a moment, all slides will be uploaded to the Eden's SlideShare account. SlideShare actually is still existing. And the recording will also be made available. So you can have everything which you need also afterwards for your own study. So I would like to invite some questions. We have three, four minutes. And please, everybody, type it. It's a verbally, right? To really go? I answer verbally. Yes. And I would like to ask all the participants to just type their questions into the chat like Ildiko just did it. And now Alfredo please, yeah. Okay, thank you. The question that certificates also varies along very much because for instance, there are certificates in certain engineering organizations where you need to have 40 hours, 60 hours per year or equivalent in terms of CPD. Otherwise you'll lose your status. So the certificates somehow are indirect because you have the status of a chartered engineer for instance in Britain. Or for instance, like in my country, if you want to be going for an upper level in the association, you need to have a certain amount of CPD. You cannot progress without having a proof. So the certificate is indirect in these cases. Other certificates are, and that was what Valdi was very concerned, they wanted certificates for specific topics. For instance, I don't know, Wolf is German. So we may say something. But our colleague Thomas Kieffer and Lars Wohl they were interested in having for instance a certification on languages. So the engineers that were members were going through a process of having somehow proof that they could have proficiency in certain languages and according to the levels Valdi was then awarding the certificates. So the certificates vary a lot. Either they are used for professional recognition but for instance one that is necessary is for instance those civil like in Greece. The civil engineers, they need to be members of the association, otherwise they cannot sign projects. That's a question of responsibility. So the certificate ensures that these people have the right qualifications to build or design or maintain the buildings in Greece. The buildings in other constructions. It varies a lot. Thank you very much. I'm also wondering if the certificates are also electronic or do they receive paper certificates with the institutional stamp or something? For instance in my home country there is a program which is called Valerie which is only to record your progress in times of life-long learning or CPD or continuing education and then they produce certificates which are electronic. You can download them and you can use them and you can show them in your portfolio or in your Facebook or whatever. You can show the certificate from the association saying these people have done so much so they are up to date and they can ask for more money when they ask for payment for the services. Basically that's what motivates engineers to have this recognition of competence. Thank you very much for your answer. I think that we should move on to the next to the third presentation and Ilyko you have the chance to raise your question while speaking on your topic. Sorry for pressing on. I think that the issue of validating learning, validating competencies Alfrido was now talking about will continue a little bit also in your presentation Ilyko. I think this is a topic which many of us are working on actually. I'm very happy to have this presentation which is coming up which was prepared by two presenters by Ilyko of course and by Anthony Camarieri. Before I move on I would like to thank you Alfrido again for your presentation and the materials which you shared with us. Thank you very much. So now coming to the next the presentation is on open credentials. So you see we are staying with the topic of credentialing, validating competencies, validating learning. Open credentials for open education, moving the needle forward. Very interesting. Ilyko Mazar is going to present she is working at the Research and Development at the Knowledge Innovation Center. I'm sorry, she's working as Research and Development Associate at the Knowledge Innovation Center and she has also extensive work experience in the field of open and distance education and e-learning since more than 10 years, 20 years actually and she is also in the field of innovative ICT solutions facilitating their practical application also which is the most challenging actually and I'm very happy to have you here Ilyko. Welcome to the presentation and now the floor is yours. Thank you very much Ulf and it really is a great pleasure to be back in the Eden Circle, my old family and be sharing some of our recent work at the Knowledge Innovation Center. My questions to Alfredo of course were not entirely selfless because as you will see and Ulf also pointed out my presentation plugged in very well to the thread that was started by Santara and Irina and continued by Alfredo. Let's see how much I can add to that within the next 10 to 15 minutes. I could talk so much more so please try to keep me on time because I have a lot to say and I have very little time. My starting statement will be something that you will all agree with that education is or at least should be a public good and what I mean by that is that there should be an open access to educational opportunities. We should be using as much open educational resources as possible and by this empower students by the provision of open educational practices. Now the typical process model for open education is of course we start with the open educational resources and the inputs. We have the open educational practices as the process but what we have coming out from the process at the end and the output is something that is not as widely discussed as the previous two stages and I'm very pleased that the previous two presentations were discussing such length the validation and the recognition because I think what we have to agree on is that the credentials coming out at the end of the open educational practices also have to be open and informative. What I'm going to suggest is unfortunately that the digital credentials are broken and what I suggest are the problems with digital credentials is that they are not really digital at the moment and one of the reasons why I asked Alfredo what the credentials they're issuing are I'm going to describe every single one of these points a bit more in detail there's limited access to underlying information there's a lack of technical standards for credential information the standards that are available for security and verification I'm sure our Lithuanian colleagues will agree are very often closed and unfortunately there's no aggregated credential data available on these things so what I mean by credentials still not being fully digital is that of course there are digitized versions of paper-based certificates and credentials but the primary medium of providing credentials is still the paper-based certificate or degree and the digitization most of the times it's just scanning a document and making that into a PDF or in a better case there's a digital signature attached to that to ensure its verifiability but as we will all agree this is not really a digital credential there could be a lot to improve on that what I mean by the limited access to underlying information if you recall the third point of Irene's presentation there should be underlying information or whoever's the table presented by Sandra that when there is a whole big table of the learning outcomes the whole learning plan I argue that when anybody would like to make an informed decision on recognizing credentials that underlying information is extremely important if you take an ordinary certificate and for the illustration of this point I took a Coursera certificate I participated in an online course in 2017 and what I would like to prove in this that although this is a Coursera certificate that was particularly issued by an online education provider a big one you will see that there's the verification link in the bottom right corner of this certificate or this document but in fact it's not clickable and there is no information available on the screen or in the PDF that could lead anybody who would like to verify or assess the content of this certificate to learning outcomes or learning hours or learning plans anything and that's without even posing the possibility of forging such a certificate if I'm good enough with photo editing software I could probably create a certificate like this within a relatively short period of time of course I would use such a certificate anyway if I was applying for a job but although we know that most applicants for a job would spend about three to four hours in preparing their application we will see that 72% of employers spend less than 15 reviewing each application and that is a really serious mismatch and basically what we come to at the end is that if the employer would have to take a lot of time to verify a credential and it takes more time than testing the skill itself the credential is effectively worthless and that's my underlining point so even if it has a beautiful watermark the document is not going to be verified by the employer because they do not have the time also just sticking with the application for jobs and coming to my third point the lack of technical standards and what I mean by the lack of technical standards is of course employers use technology to screen applications for a job but 62% of employers admit that some qualified candidates may be ruled out in their process because they are using unsuitable software and programs to narrow down to filter out the candidates with the highest potential simply because what they normally do is a very basic keyword search and some keywords may be missing from some applications and that is really a pity and again disheartening for the applicants who spend so much time trying to apply for a job when it comes to standards for security and verification and that's also addressing the point of forging documents like online or digital certificates another unfortunate problem is that the standards are closed and are provided by third party institutions and I think we all agree that this is really unfair that if there's a relationship between an education provider and an individual who owns the credential at the end of the learning journey they shouldn't be going through a third party and pay additional amounts of money to get that kind of electronic verification so that they can securely apply for jobs or get their certifications or credentials recognized by another higher education institution if they study further or an employer and my final fifth point was the non-availability of aggregated credential data and my metaphor that I would like to use here is that even though you could check the average star rating for a hotel in any European countries within a few clicks on whatever software program or website you're using the same information is not available on such an important issue as the job market demand and the education providing institutions supply on certain skills, competences and qualifications and that would be a hugely valuable piece of information for the institutions who are trying to tailor their education provision but also individuals who are planning their career path or who would like to engage in further education get a second degree so I think we all agree that this would be a very nice additional data or side effect that we would have if we had more really truly digital credentials available so just to sum it up close credentials are expensive and often very time consuming to acquire if you for example would like to get a supplement diploma because you lost the one that you acquired 20 years ago you would probably have to go through a lengthy procedure, pay a fee to the administrative department of your former university and wait until the document arrives to you by career or anything it's not very convenient when you're applying for jobs that have very short and high deadlines they're also very hard to use and share as I said if you just scan a document and send it as an email attachment it's not really the same as a purposefully designed digital certificate they also hinder open education and this is the topic we're discussing everybody agrees that lifelong learning continuing open education via non-formal and informal means as well as having patchwork learning from several different institutions and online learning so all those people who are advanced or unfortunate enough like migrants who would have to take advantage of credential transferability they are locked out because of the close credentials so they are excluded and they would need them the most and of course close credentials could be abused by networks of intermediaries and even unintentionally destroyed by the issuing organization so they're not really owned by the owner of the credential who did the learning and the information not being available the non-information does not inform policy at the end but there is a way to more open learning to fix that credentialing and make those open so how do we disrupt or how could we disrupt credentials for the public benefit the good news is that we have all the pieces available for an open credential system we just have to be smart and strategic about utilizing them and the elements that I would like to highlight are EU standards for qualifications we are all familiar with the European qualifications framework this gives an indication as to the level of the various qualifications offered by education institutions the European deployment supplement provides a standardized template to give additional information about the degree this is widely used by universities across Europe ECTS needless to say again very widely used by European higher education provider institutions and the ESCO database the European skill competencies qualifications and occupations database provides a standard terminology although that is not used by every European countries not to mention widespread use by different European institutions the drawback unfortunately is and that's what we have to work on and fix or try to add to is that the EQF is not applicable to non-formal education or micro credentials it just doesn't go to that small level of micro credentials the European deployment supplement is strictly related to degrees again not applicable to micro qualifications or credentials the ECTS although it gives an amazing vocabulary and tool to describe little micro granulate of learning it's only applicable to higher education and not fully in qualification and the ESCO database is actually not used at all by the former theme which is quite an interesting phenomenon considering that these are all EU standards when it comes to the technical standards of course you are aware that the technical standards do exist for example open badges but what I would like to argue is the technical standards of open badges may be too open to be useful for a mechanism like higher education another system that exists is a national ID system and these could replace those third party companies to be the sources of trust for signing the problem with that even if you don't speak Slovene this is a Slovenian example of the national ID system but even if you did understand what this says you can tell that this system is too complex to use for an average person so practically not user friendly and what we do have is a very promising new technology blockchain that could also facilitate the introduction of a decentralized system that would make the third intermediary partner redundant but the problem with blockchain although that's what we are experimenting with is that it's still extremely young technology so we'll probably have to wait a few years before we can comfortably say that this is something that we can apply to the big mechanism of European higher education and when it comes to a global platform for skill recognition the sad truth is that this actually already exists it wasn't an EU initiative it's linked in but you can or employers can filter out potential job seeking candidates by skills but I think we again all agree that it shouldn't be a single company who have a monopoly on skill data it should be a collective public good again and open and accessible so what we propose is that the elements of a system for open education credentials that should be realized by user health credentials so the credentials are in the hand of the holder who earns the credentials they rely on open standards and open text deck they have independent verification maybe in itself the the credential would be the source of verification itself and we have heard examples from the previous presentations how this is actually possible to do and that it produces open aggregation and the two projects that I would kindly ask you to keep an eye on unfortunately I won't have time to go into much detail in what these two projects are doing but I can share the links in the didn't work but I share the links to the two projects in the chat one is called the OEPAS and this is to create a digital standard format for documenting open education credentials based on ECTS we just started piloting our digital learning and the other even more ambitious initiative both of these projects are Erasmus Plus projects by the way funded by the EU is to create a model blockchain infrastructure for storing and automatically verifying credentials and again we have already kind of produced a minimum viable output so we are in the process of internally testing how good it is for the middle level of testing and then you can lean back if you like and imagine a future where recognition is universal, automatic and seamless because that's what we are trying to drive this process towards and to get back to my first slide just to round the whole presentation up I'm suggesting that when it comes to the typical model of open education we have the open educational resources is aimed at open educational practices and we do end up with open educational credentials as the output along the lines I described during the presentation thank you for your attention and again warmly invite you to check out the web pages there will be more information about the outputs we are working on and the public activities or get in touch with me, here is my email we will share the PowerPoint presentation on the hidden website and it will be also my slide share thank you for your attention, if you have any questions thank you very much Ilyko a very very impressive presentation where the problems and the challenges we are facing are mapped out and worked out very very well and you are also or we are also working in this project on solutions blueprints for solutions for that, thank you very very much very very clear and impressive presentation so there is one question in the chat from Fransiska, she asked are there, no there is the second one are there feedbacks on how employers recognize these certificates I assume that the questions are there feedbacks on how employers recognize these blockchain certificates that is one question and the second question we have only one and a half minutes for the questions is from Stefania hello Stefania are you thinking of a wider framework, EU relevant to be adopted by universities or of single universities establishing their own system Ilyko can you answer to the questions and be very short in one and a half minutes yes well the certificates to Fransiska the certificates themselves are beyond our reach so the certificates that are issued by the education providers will have to be thoughtfully created by the education providers there is no shortcut to that and remember quickly go back to the five building blocks of an open credential if I find it until we have a comprehensive solution what I can suggest you to do and this was said before by my fellow presenters use learning outcome in your certificate use secure certificate and avoid proprietary certificate software and if you can ensure that then your certificates will be informative enough I think and this is just we obviously cannot ask every employer and there will be more advanced employers and less advanced employers Frido can probably answer this question better because engineers tend to be more advanced but I think what would be the key is that within a few clicks just like in open batches you flip the pretty card and behind the pretty face and the batch symbol there will be a list of metadata if your credential is built up properly and this is something that the micro HG project is helping you as we have a comprehensive metadata standard then your credential should at least allow the employers to see what's behind the underlying information behind the credential so they won't care about what's the name of the university what's the knowledge skill Thank you that's the answer to the first question can you say in half a minute but we really have to move on because we are already in the time of the last presenter we have already cut off time from the last presenter now right now at this very second but can you maybe answer to Stefania's question in half a minute or just Stefania please get in touch with us through the contact form of the micro HG website the quick answer is that we are not providing a system that will be used widely but we will present a tool that universities, individual universities will be able to test and use if they like it will be functional so thank you very much thank you also for your questions everybody I quickly move on to the last presentation of the day today we have a very stable attendance thank you for being with us today in this webinar session of the European Distance Learning Week Distance Learning Week thank you Ildiko for your presentation so the last presentation of today is carrying the title online learners interactions and engagement into study process it is done by Jedre, I hope I pronounce it right Tamuli Leune from Witautus Magnus University Jedre Tamuli Leune is a junior researcher at the university working at international and national scientific and applied projects and she's mainly focusing on higher education and I'm very happy to have you with us and to be able to listen to your presentation so the floor is yours, please hello thank you for inviting me to join this webinar session and my presentation will be a bit more this thing from the previous ones and very much data driven that will present some case let's say of Witautus Magnus University but I think it will help us to recognize and maybe confirm the gaps existing in the process of digitalizing learning achievements so while she has in fact some figures from the desk research that was conducted at Witautus Magnus University revealing basic information regarding students involvement into online modules this presentation will disclose the work regarding learning behavior and engagement into online courses for the beginning I will be brief with over viewing some main theoretical aspects that have been explored so far and so results of research disclose that interfaces between students participation number of submissions to discussion forums attendance of online lectures and students performance on the project assignment are very much significant for students success and achievement while teachers activities become significant as they no longer deliver predetermined knowledge but rather encourage learners to control their own learning process and construct their own knowledge teachers role changes from knowledge deliverer to learning designer and recent research recognizes the significance of educational theory for this process as there is a possible danger to imagine that numbers may speak for themselves without a need for a theory as the researchers need theoretical cornerstones to step on in order to know how to interpret the results to and make them actionable so what data is important for us as the teachers such as the new when we discuss students engagement into online modules at the moment there are more than 2500 modules on the new Moodle platform and as you can see there has been a significant increase since 2012 and it is so because director Zorda was regulating and encouraging teachers to upload the modules to transfer them onto Moodle and of course not all new modules are delivered fully online some of them are still face to face or blended courses but they all must provide access to the learning resources at least as well a high number of students which is more than 5000 accessing online study modules prove the need for an engaging curriculum design and at the same time demonstrates the potential variety of different learners behavior that teachers may face so this chart demonstrates number of learners who access the new online learning platform from foreign countries each year in some cases these numbers might not seem so impressive but regarding the fact that in 2011 there were students from 20 countries 60 years later the number has increased nearly 6 times and these tendencies and increased needs for more open online curriculum encourage university teachers to accept the challenges and prepare the course to be more open, flexible and adapted to different learning needs this is the log data which shows us as the teachers and researchers the approach to better understand behavioral patterns and interactions during different stages of the semester here we can see that learners are most active on Mondays of course most passive on Saturdays nevertheless during the midterm period which is in October number of active users increased quite a lot during the weekends as well as well the number of active users increases during the tasks exams and other activities for learners that are evaluated by teachers and I would like to show you a bit more detail patterns of learners behavior this learners behavior flow chart illustrates learners interaction and engagement it presents overall number and trends of interactions on model and is not related to any specific module this revealed that after working in nearly 20% of learners drop out from platform and we were wondering why so we thought that the assumptions were that maybe they want to remind themselves of the password or they want just to show their last sign in data for teachers those who don't drop out after the first interaction 80% of them tend to drop out after monitoring the module page we can assume that those students aim to check if there is any new information uploaded in the course with the first click learners spend time checking forums assignments and other approaches when it's engagement into forums is confirmed by the fact that 90% of all sessions aim to towards forums and 75% of learners move from the course to the assignment page and the following data confirms the basic principle of internet users habits that they quit after the third click in our case 24% of learners quit after the fourth click they have checked the overall course information discussion on news forums assignments and that's it this data discloses the tendency when learners who tend to spend more time and have more than more interactions demonstrate lower drop out rate and is more or less equally distributed among different activities as there is no significant difference in drop out rates from the first step this behavior may be related to learners motivation to study and search for more information those who aim for more knowledge and in-depth understanding of the subject spend more time analyzing course content moreover this demonstrates that the students tend to access the most recent lecture information rather than the overall course material this data should help teachers to understand prepared learning patterns and develop course content based on that if we look at this from the other point of view the previously presented tendencies of trends of learners engagement with a model platform and learning content correlates with the fact that since 2012 there has been a significant growth in number of assignments and forums in online study courses learners engagement into forums and assignments show that they are engaged into active tasks and those that are evaluated and assessed by peers or teachers moreover teachers aim to integrate more motivational tools helping to assess, observe, empower and student learning process and at the same time encourage them to engage more actively into course activities the most recent system that we have integrated is the digital badges they have been introduced to the manual less than half a year ago and those since then there were around 500 teachers rewarded with digital badges based on their module openness it is nearly 70% of all the new teachers and we believe that this demonstrate high quality of online courses because to get the badge for the course openness it has to be assessed by the expert team who the module so 23 the number has won 23 experts have been awarded for the continuous input and to quality assurance of online modules as well they received digital badges and so far six study courses from the field of social sciences provide the badges for students who are active in discussions participation in forums and implement additional tasks despite the ongoing progress and improvement of online modules in many occasions there is a gap between knowing that a certain variable about learners behavior is significant and knowing how to act upon it to encourage their engagement into study course and this is a very short look at the research which is done recently at the moment regarding the new teachers approach towards use of learning analytics data for their practice improvement so total number from sponsors present opinions of a very small part of teachers as the questionnaire is still open and not all of them have finished telling it yet the most optimistic and inspiring part for us as researchers is that teachers are willing to learn they understand the usefulness of learning analytics and the data they can use for their course improvement they want to analyze data and work with it in order to improve their curriculum and this gives us hope that the analysis of learners behavior interaction or engagement will become part of each university teachers practice as well as learners will be aware that they can monitor their own learning participation and engagement control the risk of failure and reach for their own learning goals thank you very very much for the presentation I found that is a real interesting data that are real interesting data which you presented there also in a very very interesting way to look at it and to analyze it these pathways through the content thank you very much for your presentation a very very well understandable presentation I would like to encourage participants now to ask questions and that can be directed to the last presenter to Jedra or also to other presenters if you like which are still in the room and meanwhile I think we have 2 or 3 minutes left here are they all again back so meanwhile we are waiting if somebody has a question or comment I would like again to thank all of you very much for your time and your presentation from all over Europe we are here and it has been a very very good session was really interesting very fresh data fresh projects and excellent results which you can also remember the first presentation by Irina and Sandra can use for your own university processes so take benefit from that thanks to all of you and one thing I would like to say and not forget is that you can receive a badge for this making part in this session if you haven't registered to the webinar and wish to receive an open badge you can register at the link which is now displayed by the Eden Secretariat thanks to the Eden Secretariat also for the setup hosting of the webinar and all the absolutely excellent support that's really absolutely noticeable that you have a lot of experience in this very very well done very much very flexible support and with that I would like to say my last point and that is the European Distant Learning Week is continuing tomorrow and the next days check out the schedule and there are more interesting webinars coming up tomorrow and during the whole week sometimes one, sometimes two a day and I think now on behalf of the organizers I would like to wish you a nice day thank you for your participation thanks again to all the presenters for the presentations and the session is being recorded so you can come back to that and find it in the archives the slides are going to be uploaded thank you very much and see you online or offline wherever next time thanks