 So I wanted to welcome you all to this webinar at the Eden European Open and Distance Learning Week 2020. My name is Ebba Ocean-Elsson. I'm a professor in innovation and open online learning. And I'm also in the Eden EC, the Executive Committee. And I'm also sharing the Eden Special Interest Group on Quality and Technology Enabled Learning. So this webinar, besides it's due in the EODL week 2020, it's also on behalf of the Special Interest Group of Quality and Open Online Quality and Intel and Innovation. So we have a webinar for one hour. And I would like to, if you like, present yourself in the chat where you are coming from. And as usually for the Zoom meetings, we have the chat where you can write things or share links. And we have also the Q&A function where you can raise questions. In case you would like to post something on social media from this event, the hashtag is hashtag EODLWE 2020. So you're most welcome to do so. We will have one hour and we will have approximately 30 minutes of the presentation. And then we have plenty of time for discussion and question and answers and dialogue. The session is recorded and you can find the recording at the Eden webpage. And then you will also find it afterwards in the emails. So once again, I would like to welcome you all to this webinar. I'm Epocha Nilsson from Eden EC and I'm based in Sweden. And this webinar is on Promoting Digital Education in the Commonwealth. And we are very happy to have Dr. Sanjaya Mishra here together with us today. He is an Education Specialist in the Commonwealth of Learning based in Canada. Dr. Sanjaya Mishra joined the Commonwealth of Learning as Education Specialist. E-Learning at his headquarters in Canada on the 2nd January 2015. Previously he served the Commonwealth of Learning as Director of the Commonwealth Education and Media Centre for Asia. It used to be called SAMCA. From 1st July 2012 to 31st December 2012 to 1st December 2014. Dr. Mishra is one of the leading scholars in open distance and online learning. So I'm very, very happy to have you here. It's a great pleasure. And prior to joining Commonwealth of Learning he was Program Specialist, ICT in Education, Science and Culture at UNESCO in Paris. Dr. Mishra has over 25 years of experiences in design, development and management of open and distance learning programs with a blend of academic and professional qualification in library and information science, distance education, television production and training and development. He has been promoting the use of education with the media, e-learning and the use of open education resources, OER and open access to scientific information around the world. During his service in different capacities at the India Gandhi National Open University amongst many innovative activities and programs he developed the OER-based one-year postgraduate diploma in e-learning. So Dr. Mishra is a very, very well known worldwide and he contributed a lot to the field of open education. And right now at this moment he is also the Fallen Walls finalist, 2020. It's very exciting and it is so well-deserved. So I wish us a very fruitful and interesting conversation together with Dr. Sanjay Mishra. So now I give the floor to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Iba. I will start immediately with sharing of my presentation to move forward. So it's a privilege and honor to be speaking at an event organized by Eden. Eden is one of the leading distance and e-learning network around the world and its activities are always path-breaking in a sense that it focuses on the real needs of its members and institutions. So thank you, Eden, for giving me this opportunity to speak about the work that we do at the Commonwealth of Learning. And of course without the invitation of Dr. Iba who is quite active in the field especially in the distance education network and open educational resources. She is always probably scouting for and of course she is one of my long list in person for whom I know for a long time and we are in the same network. So thank you Iba for this opportunity to be with this group of people and thank you everyone. Welcome everyone. I joined Iba in welcoming you all to this presentation on European online and distance learning week. This is the best way of celebrating of what contributions people in the field of open and distance learning are doing. So I'm really happy and I would like to proceed with my presentation especially what the kind of work that I have been doing at the Commonwealth of Learning and out of that I will focus only on one particular project which is digital education in the Commonwealth. Many of you may be knowing that Commonwealth of Learning was established in 1987 by the Commonwealth head sub-government. We are an intergovernmental organization based in Vancouver with one another office in Delhi. Our main goal is to promote open distance technology mediated education to improve access to quality education and training in the Commonwealth. But many of our activities and work span across the globe and the kind of work that we do are having strong relevance and appropriateness for many other countries including Europe. Particularly our work in the field of open educational resources has always been widely acknowledged along with our work in collaboration with UNESCO. And ICDE and many other organizations in this sphere. Without much elaboration about our work I would focus on the typical example of digital education in the Commonwealth and the title of this presentation is promoting digital education in the Commonwealth but I will be giving you a glimpse of this initiative that Commonwealth of Learning is doing and how it is having impact across the globe and more specifically in the Commonwealth countries. So this is the main page of the website that we have created and Dr. Eba pointed out that this has been a finalist in the World Science Summit which is called Falling Walls which will be educated sometime this week but I am really happy and excited that we are one of the finalists for this summit which is important because digital education is getting more and more and when we started this activity not much many people were talking about digital education per se so what is digital education? We started this initiative in 2015 but we were looking for something that we should be having digital skills training at a scale now there was a huge recognition that digital skills are important for lifelong learning digital skills are important but the way to accelerate the pace of digital skills training was not enough because the scalability of teaching and learning approaches through the face to face training was limited so we were looking for something that we can scale up to a large number of people and we thought that a web-based platform to start with would be a good way and then we also looked at that while more and more students are having more adequate ease of using digital tools teachers are not having the same kind of skills so we thought about focusing on both teachers in offering the skills training and then we thought that whatever activities we are doing should lead to lifelong learning and of course it will improve student success in a long-term approach so C-Delta is a platform for digital education which provides a scalable platform for both students and teachers to be a continuous lifelong learners we started the whole development in 2015 as an international collaboration of experts so it was not just something that we developed on our own but we banked on the expertise of people from both commonwealth and non-commonwealth countries initially the conceptual framework was developed by colleagues from the University of Cape Town but they were also enriched by the advice from people around the world so we had an international advisory group which looked into content development and review of the learning materials that were prepared then once the learning materials were prepared we moved that into a technological platform that is C-Delta.call.org this platform is a secured platform which provides a dashboard for the user where the user can take pre-test, post-test and continuously do self-learning or in bages involved in social media to share the work done and of course that certification at different levels of fluency so what is the whole contours of digital education that commonwealth digital education leadership training in action C-Delta in brief so we conceptualized digital education leadership as a holistic approach where digital literacy is a center digital education is built around digital literacy and digital leadership is the overall framework of things that everything covered within digital education and digital literacy so basically we start with digital literacy is a social practice that digital literacy would enable people to undertake various activities of their life including education and training and lifelong learning so it's a social practice where people are involved and engaged and therefore that becomes an integral part of their life but then we looked at digital literacy is not enough digital literacy is necessary but not sufficient to become a good digital education leader or digital education person digital educated person in that sense so what do you mean by that you may be efficient in using social media but you may not be knowing how to use social media for teaching and learning so that's where the key aspect comes in or you may be knowing to code something but how do you know to code those things for developmental purpose so just to give an example we are largely on using digital tools for education and training so digital literacy is not enough so you need to learn how to make use of digital tools for education and training and the third and the most important thing is that everyone can become a digital education leader a digital education leader is one who has the competency of digital literacy and digital education skills but also able to influence others in his or her sphere of network so the digital education leader is one who is not only master of the skills but also is an influencer in the community that he or she works for the teachers, schools and education system for the students it could be in their own network and beyond in the society so digital education leaders if we believe that anyone can become a digital education leader irrespective of the position it is not necessary that you just need to be a principal or a head teacher to become a digital education leader so that's the whole framework on which it works but it has several components to it the structure is that leadership and digital education are in the leadership is looked at four different dimensions which is announcing access developing capacity making informed decisions and cultivating innovation whereas digital education is looked at how do you mobilize resources how to develop digital identities and footprints and of course how do you engage critically within and with the networks so that you use the power of the network to your learning and success overall and as a lifelong learner so the whole curriculum C delta is based on these seven areas and therefore there are seven modules in the course which the students take a module one to three whereas the teachers take all the seven the idea is that the students workload is limited because their focus needs to be on their curricular subject and this is an additional learning material that they are expected to do during their curricular learning whereas for the teachers we have focused on all the seven modules primarily because we want them to have a higher level of understanding of what is digital education and of course they are the one who will be influencing learners and the community more so they need to cover the whole contours of the learning materials of course these are all self learning and our experience shows that the engagement with all the learning modules are not equivalent for all the learners in the platform we have different types of users technically we consider everyone in the platform as a learner but we look at the categories of learners in two groups primarily as learners and teachers and practitioners based on which the modules are allocated for learning on an automatic process your profile decides which content you are going to learn and of course because of the implementation process which is focused on institutional implementation as well as implementation in a specific country we have group managers who actually look into how the learners in the platform in a particular group are being engaged and these group managers provide many a time scaffolding to both the teachers in the ecosystem and also the learner in the ecosystem so the group managers play a critical role in enhancing the completion rate on the platform of course besides that we have the super admin who has all the controls on the platform there are modules there are seven modules all these modules are accessible to anyone through the C-delta platform but that only happens when you complete the pre-test depending on the taking of the pre-test and your profile the modules gets opened and then you can learn through these interactive modules through your own self-learning self-paced way there is no limit when you can start and when you can complete when there is no cohort based approach it's an open platform for anyone to join in and learn anytime the whole idea is that to have mastery learning so there are a lot of practice within the learning modules that you can do again and again until you think that you are very confident to take on the post-test and improve your score on the platform you can do a lot of experience sharing on the platform about things that you do as you engage through the learning materials or you are engaged with different tools and get engaged with different softwares and from that any learning or any experience that you can share in the network the whole sharing approach is to encourage creation of open educational resources and learning objects that can be utilized by other members and you can use any platform for that purpose that you can link for use by others so trying to create a culture of sharing on the platform so what happens since this is an open platform there is always a chance of people getting registered and not completing the course so we have tried to create badges on when the learner completes the module going through all the activities of the module the learner gets badges that are reflected on their dashboard and when they complete the course whether in the pre-test as a minimum gets 40% of the grades scores then they get a certificate so the certificates are at three levels also to encourage motivation so you get scores between 40 to 59 you get a beginner's level certificate and then you are encouraged oh I got a beginner's level certificate let me read the learning materials more carefully again and again and then do the post-test again and improve my score to the intermediate level or to the fluent level so we keep on building on learner motivation through badges and the certification process of course there is a support mechanism through email anybody writes email to us and we help provide technical help and support on this particular platform the overall expected outcomes on the platform of Commonwealth digital education leadership training and action can be categorized into three key components that anyone who is undergoing this specialized training on digital education skills would develop a sense of digital identity and recognize his or her own digital footprints online this is more about digital safety and safety privacy and data etc on the network so it helps people to understand how the digital tools on the network works and the second important part is the people develop appropriate skills to create and share digital artifacts and these digital artifacts are not just photos of our selfies but about how these photos and selfies or anything that you do could support learning so because this is a teaching learning and digital education the focus is on creating digital artifacts and sharing digital artifacts using probably an open license so the whole effort is creating and sharing and the third and most important is that help people to engage in personal learning networks and be leaders and lead by example and how do you read by example by creating and sharing and helping each other so you create a sphere of influence for yourself not only on the platform but creating on your own digital artifacts on platforms on blogs on social media presence so when you are in a position to do all these things you are a true fluent digital education leader or digital education skilled person that is the whole outcomes that we are working at how does this the implementation work so far we have been able to reach about 52 countries so far of which about 30 are Commonwealth countries interestingly and over 99% of the registrations come from 30 Commonwealth countries meaning that only a limited number of people from the other 22 non Commonwealth countries have registered on the platform this is primarily because we are focusing largely on a country implementation in the Commonwealth countries but through the social media there are people who are interested about exploring digital education skills on the platform from the Commonwealth countries and do join on the platform so the number of students and teachers if you see is that largely the number of registrations are from the students that is something good so we would like to have more teachers as well but going by the number of proportion of teachers and students in our schools and colleges I think it's important the numbers are very significant and useful at the same time if you look at the gender balance I think it's quite satisfactory to look at 48% female and 51% male responses even though we would like to be more 50-50 but I think it's a true representation of what is happening currently on the platform and of course in the society in general. This is something I would like to elude a little more we have about 43% of people on the platform who have completed and we have over 10,000 learners on the platform and that number is quite substantial if we look at even the completion rate we would like to make more but if we compare to the normal massive open online course the percentage of success and completion that happens in MOOCs are much lower to the completion rate that we are seeing on this platform generally because we are self-paced and the learners can do this course on their own whenever they want to do the MOOCs are most cohort-based and have a starting and ending time and therefore are more restrictive for people to complete and we have overcome that barrier by creating an online presence of anytime, anywhere learning leveraging on the power of the asynchronous learning capacity of the platform if you look at the graph on the right side we are presenting the learning improvement in the course for pre-test and post-test for all the people in the platform and some 10 identified countries if you look at the overall the growth rate on pre-test to post-test have increased about 38% which is quite significant in terms of understanding the impact on the students or the learners achievement on the platform but whereas if you look at the 10 targeted countries which I will come into details immediately after this we have about 30% increase on the pre-test and post-test course both the numbers are quite significant and shows that there has been a good impact of the course on student achievement broadly what it shows is that most of the learners who came to the platform had a level of understanding of digital education but when they completed the post-test those who completed the post-test they are overall increased to an intermediate level to a large extent and this is the summative picture of this thing but not just going into details of how individual learners improve or their learning or achievement in learning in the pre-test and post-test course. Coming to the 10 targeted countries these are some of the countries where CALL had direct intervention through partner institutions whether it was government or civil society or educational institution so what we found is there is a consistent increase in the post-test score in all these 10 countries and this ranged the post-test score ranged from about 52% to about 76% in South Africa the post-test score of 52.52 and in Bangladesh the post-test score was 76.45 so that's the kind of range but overall if you look at the post-test score consistently increased in these 10 countries one of the important thing that I want to highlight that this the whole platform can help us provide something called digital or index for the country as such if you take the number of students currently we have taken the 10 countries where we have interventions through partner institutions but overall if the platform goes more scalable to large number of countries and we get a sampling mass of learners from a particular country we can easily create digital education skills index using the platform if we use these 10 countries if you see the digital education skills overall including both pre-test and post-test scores Bangladesh comes number one out of this followed by Antigua and and then of course Uganda, India and so on and so forth so this is an I would say that it's an outcome for us to see that in future probably if we have more learners on the platform we could probably use this to measure the digital education skills and help students to strategize what kind of inputs they would like to put in to make their country, their learners and teachers in their country move from one score to another score we can also look at what kind of investment that would require in making that kind of transition so we have a robust platform which can guide students and educational institutions in future so apart from that impact what really has this platform achieved, we actually concluded an evaluation of the C-Delta platform and it highlighted some important aspects when C-Delta started there was not much being talked about digital education skills today there are several institutions who are offering programs on digital education skills but this is probably the only one which is available as an open resource or open educational resource as an open platform we have achieved, in my personal view we have reached moderate success on the platform considering the number of people and number of countries that we have reached we have applied limited marketing efforts from our side the completion rate is something quite satisfactory and this has happened because of the in-country implementation model that we applied the evaluation indicated that the simplicity of the platform has led to the overall satisfaction of the learners and the impact this platform has is significant from to make transformation in the pedagogical practices of the learners and teachers in that sense there is a significant example from Sri Lanka where the teachers have created a resource using storytelling about what they did and what they have made to their learners students actually used non-digital approaches to create their own sphere of influence to educate others about the importance of digital education skills in the process this is just a Sri Lankan example but similar examples are also available in St. Lucia, South Africa Antigua and Barbuda, Kenya and of course in Bangladesh too so let me quickly recapitulate some of the strong points vis-à-vis the European Union digital education action plan I think this is something that is coming up in Europe is very significant currently it is focused on digital competency framework but wants to plans to develop a new digital education framework which we already have a framework in Commonwealth digital education leadership training and action our framework is largely digital competence plus so we are looking at digital identity digital content creation and sharing personal learning networks and how we are to lead in the community some of these things are already covered in the digital competency framework European digital competency framework and of course the teaching and learning aspects would also come out in the whole process of deep that is being planned currently so I see the similarity in the thought processes and the activities in these two initiatives what are the key implications and way forward for us we have seen that access to internet is key wherever students and learners have access in the school or at home they have been able to use the platform quite successfully digital access access to network has been a major challenge and particularly during the pandemic so the enrollment from the schools and institutions have been slow during the last few months what we have seen that the the learners engagement on the platform are much more than the teachers engagement on the platform even though the workload of the students are beyond the curricular load they all normally take which means that the students are getting more interested in on the platform in order to mitigate the challenges more and more governments need to jump into support wherever there were government support we found that the implementation was more successful particularly in Sri Lanka in Bangladesh in St. Lucia we had in Antiquan, Burbadan places where there were support letters issued from the government or directly involved from the government things were much but better implemented the C-Delta was better implemented we also found that the we have developed a scalable platform but reaching out to the people who need it is more important so probably we need to do more marketing to reach out to also attract more people on the platform moving forward we would also like to track and understand how the skills of digital education are having impact on student success in other areas other fields other subjects does the skills of digital education have more supporting influence direct or indirect on competency building in other other areas so we would like to definitely look into some of those things in future so with this I would like to stop here and thank you and look forward to your questions and clarifications I would like to be happy to respond thank you so much Dr. Mishra it was fantastic presentation and so interesting and it's fantastic to also see the impact that the C-Delta has and has had to have presentation and I can just see from the chat also that attendances are really appreciating what you're doing and the presentation you have just done for us very many are pointing out about the batches and the modern approach and also about the nice impact on the high completion rate it's impressive I was also happy to hear that you pointed out that everyone can be a digital leader I think that is a very important message I use myself to when I have presentations especially on leadership I use to always finalize with be the leader you want to have because everyone can be a leader and have to show up there has indeed become a lot of questions both in the chat and also in the Q&A I would like to start with a question from the Eden president Sandra Kuzina Softik she wrote we often experience government support as a declarative but with no real action how to change this I think this is quite challenging but because we are an intergovernmental organization our engagement with the government is quite substantive in the commonwealth countries and many a time we are able to reach out to the right person and request them to issue a letter of support at least to a local institution or a local NGO which actually goes back with that letter of support and goes to the schools and principals and take our this platform and influence there so what happens that in this program the governments have not so far been involved in investing funding and therefore there is more support in countries like Mauritius Bangladesh, Sri Lanka they have been support letters issued whereas in country like St. Lucia and Antigua and the governments were directly involved because they see that this is something of significant value so I think it's a very challenging issue to some extent for us it has been easier but I really agree that engagement with governments are very challenging and because they would even if there is a policy the funding support from the government for a particular project becomes limited because of competing issues and challenges thank you there is a reflection from Livia van der Brande she is first saying in one comment at the difference with the digit comp and the C-delta the C-delta is for countries they get combis for individuals and then she say I'm sure that the DicComp follow up framework like DicComp for educators as well as Selfie for schools could give interesting inputs we have a majority score for region or country but in the EU this yet doesn't exist but of course this would require quite some research and maybe these efforts would be taken across the world and not only on a European scale and I also appreciated that you made some kind of not comparison but you showed what is going on in Europe the actual plan which was launched a few weeks ago can you reflect on something about what Livia is saying I think I agree with the comments and in fact when I saw this digital equation action plan 21-27 I found that's really interesting and this is something that we have been doing we looked at this and I really found the whole approach is building on a systematic process to scale of digital education that's the whole thing but currently it is focusing on digital competencies but it has an intention to build a digital education framework which we already have and we are looking at from our perspective the experience shows that we can actually develop a skills index framework digital education skills index framework but it's true that it is early to look at we need to do more research on to it and of course anything that is done in a European Union scale always should in my personal view the kind of investment that comes in should lead to work at some later point and there are experiences like C-Delta could be used to enrich the European experiences that are being planned in the next six years so I am actually looking forward to this kind of initiative that a digital education will get the more prominence in the future not just digital literacy so we have a question we have a lot of questions here in Q&A for example we have people are asking about if the seven modules are downloadable and if they are free or about the batches the modules are freely available on OASIS on our institutional repository and you can download this they are all CCBYSA materials the platform is also free for anyone to register and if you are registering on the platform you go to an interactive learning environment where you do pre-test and post-test and download the certificates but if you don't want to do that you can go to the repository and learn on your own but you won't get the interactivity of the platform that you want to do so you can make use of the resources interestingly these course materials that we have developed are being used extensively in other institution and resource countries I would cite one one future Learn Book which is being used as a resource within the course so it is already being used by many institutions in their courses here is a question again from Live Fundabunder does the Commonwealth have projects whereby they connect teachers across countries to an open platform we are engaged in different community of practice as such we don't have one platform for all the countries but we have different community of practice for specific projects like for example of course this platform is a community of practice and itself where people are sharing their own understanding on digital education and what they are doing but other than that there are other platforms where there are technological learning community of practice where currently we have about 12 countries 12 institutions from 10 countries so there are different platforms where we are connecting with institutions as well but not specifically one where everyone is there for all particular, all purposes we have thematic communities of practice so then we have actually two reflections from Arun Mohanad the first one is how can we put the feeling in learning to online education I want to feel in the teachers and materials and also the question reflection about how do you make sure that when you make one platform of e-learning education that each person get the same quality of education very challenging question the whole purpose is online learning is considered to be dehumanizing because you are learning on your own but as an educationist my approach has always been to promote blended approach to teaching and learning using online learning in the blended fashion so if you look at the C-Delta implementation our focus on these 10 countries were largely blended so we work through teachers we train teachers on the platform and ask them you now are trained go to your school, recruit students to be online and provide mentorship to the students and to also your other teachers to develop your digital education leadership skills so in a process that this platform tries to build those blended learning opportunities in the whole process even though the platform is online we are probably trying to treat both paths so for example if you are registering as an individual on the platform probably you don't get a mentor or do not get connected a little bit through the social approach but there is a limitation but when we are going to institutional implementation or a country implementation we have a more blended approach so we are trying to take the best of the both worlds possible but definitely inculcating the emotional part on teaching and learning is a challenge but it's still possible to do through different means including using online tools to do that there are different ways of doing things I don't think it's important now to elaborate on some of those things but it is possible to do even online there is a lot of comments on appreciations of your presentation and your work you are doing really there is a tendency that he or she has got to the course and found it very useful some of the modules there is one reflection of comment here from Dhanaswara Harishandan from India how to promote digital literacy effectively among the rural population Yes, thank you Professor Harishandan I think the challenge that we are finding today is access to internet people do have mobile phones but do not have the data and if they have the data the bandwidth is low so the important aspect is that while we keep promoting digital education skills digital literacy as an important part a lot of things need to be done at the ground level in most countries in most low and middle income countries is to upgrade the technological infrastructure to create the last mile of access of course there are tools like Calls Aptus which provides offline access to the online world through the local server and those kind of implementations still can be done for many of our activities but it's important to recognize that digital skills needs access to digital tools so if we want to empower learners I think we need to focus on this and particularly the whole approach should be going mobile and anything that we develop should be more about mobile first approach and then what happens most more and more people these days are having mobile applications or mobile phones so then it helps us to reach more people in rural areas as well but it's easier said than it's a long way to go in most countries so thank you so much I covered most of the questions and reflections of course the discussion can go on for longer but we have got a very nice introduction and very deep information about the Sea Delta and as I said earlier I can see from the chat that people are really really appreciating this webinar and what you have shared together with us and I'm sure that the conversation will continue in one or another way please if you like share your thoughts on social media and use the hashtag EODLW2020 and I'm also sure that the conversation will continue in different ways not at least in social media and maybe also directly to you Sanjaya and Commonwealth of Learning so people who have attended this webinar will follow up on Commonwealth of Learning what you are doing and to follow you on also social media because it's really a lot of good things you are doing and that is also why you have been awarded the Fallen Walls 2020 so we are really keeping the thumbs for you and keep the flag high hopefully let me see there were just so many comments right now so by that we are together with all the participants thank you so much for being part of this webinar for the EDEN European Online Distance Learning Week 2020 it has been great to have you here and that you shared your experiences and insights and the impact of Sea Delta and I'm sure we will follow it many of us so by that I will close this webinar for today and thank you all for being here for all your questions all your thoughts from the attendance and I will also remind you that we have a new day tomorrow and at 3 o'clock Central European time we will have a discussion for the AUDL 2020 tomorrow 3 o'clock CET and the topic is that we are all in this together rising to the challenges and please follow the very interesting webinars during the week it will continue even on Monday the week after so it is a prolonged week this year and I will thank you all very much for being here and for your contribution and most of all to you and I wish you all the best all of you take care and be safe and stay healthy and all the best to you thank you very much thank you Ibar, it's a pleasure