 Hello everyone, welcome to the Eden webinars during the European online and distance learning week. We will start shortly. We're just waiting for one speaker to join us. Meanwhile, in the chat, you can introduce yourself and tell us where are you from. So, we need to do until we find our last speaker for today's session. Okay, so while Irina prepares the slides, I will just give the introduction into the session. So, welcome to today's session, which is titled digitally enhanced learning at European high education institutions, state of play and prospects. And I'm very happy that today we will have very interesting session presenting the results of the survey, which was carried from March to June 2020, by European universities association within the project Erasmus project DGHE. And this is a survey which on digitally enhanced learning and teaching and long higher education institutions across the Europe. So, I'm certain that information gathered will be of high interest to all of us. Coincident with the lockdown and physical distancing, the survey results provide some information on the sector's crisis response, but mainly focus on the status ante and on the plan for the future. So, the service, the survey was open to universities and other high educations across the Europe, and mostly almost 80% of the institution which participated in the survey are conventional universities, offering mainly on campus tuition, although the majority of them offered already before the crisis blended and some online learning, usually through short courses. So, today we will provide some insights also how institutions responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and present some key findings. And we will discuss them with the three university representatives. So, let me present my speakers today. We have planned to have Michael Gable from European University Association. He is late. I hope he will join us. But as the representatives from the universities, we have Irina Volngević-Ciena, director of innovative studies with Attus Manus Magnus University. She's either former president and my dear friend. Irina has been working among leading researchers, methodology specialist and education policy makers in the area of technology enhanced learning development in Europe in Lithuania since 1997, and having established the National Network for Distance and eLearning in the country, then Lithuania Distance and eLearning Association in 2010. She continued as a leader in research and project work to promote the development of technology enhanced learning in Lithuania and Europe, introducing many innovations in different education organizations from school vet, adult learning and higher education sector. Second panelist speaker of today is Philip M. Plitt, full professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Philip holds a PhD in science and is tenured professor of applied physics at both the Ecole Polytechnique de Bruxelles and the Solvay-Brasil School of Economic and Management of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He used to be vice-director there for teaching and learning affairs and director of teaching and learning center. He presently starts a position of academic responsible for quality unit at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Polytechnique de Bruxelles, and in the frame of teaching and learning and teaching initiative of European University Association, Philip acted as a chair of a thematic working group on evident base approaches to learning and teaching. And the last, not least, our speaker is Marta Rzulovic, vice-director for student studies and quality assurance at the University of Rijeka in Croatia. She received her PhD in field of biophysics in 2002 from the University of Zagreb. She worked as a research academic teacher at medical faculty, faculty of engineering and department of biotechnology at University of Rijeka, and she established the University IT Academy and the e-learning center. She published 41 original scientific papers, participated in 12 research projects, and authored two university textbooks. Since this year, she's a member of European University Association Learning and Teaching Steering Committee. So, I'm certain that we will have quite interesting discussion today on the results. Irina, I think that as a panelist, you can go down there to share screen, and then you can share the presentation. So, please, can you step in and start with the presentation, and then after each slide, we will open discussion. I ask the participants to join with their comments and their questions in the Q&A, so that we can have a joint discussion on the results presented regarding this survey. So, Irina, please, floor is yours. So, Sandra, I just saw that Michael is in the room, and I'm so happy that I was wanting just to share with you that nobody would introduce better to work than Michael. So, please, hello, Michael, how are you? Are you ready to move on? Sorry. Sorry, I had some difficulties getting in. So, good afternoon, everybody. So, I guess it would be more comfortable for you if you could then share your screen. I do that. Yep. Okay. Just a second. So, we found our last speaker. So, Michael Gabel from European University Association will take over and give the short introduction in the results of survey. Michael is Director of High Education Policy Unit, and also he worked for more than a decade in high education cooperation and development in Middle East, the former Soviet Union and Asia. Michael, we already described what is the session about, who are the speakers, so now the floor is yours to present the results of the survey. All right. Thanks. Can you see my screen now? Yes. Yep. Good. Then I go ahead. So, I'm going to present results from a survey where we collected data between March and June 2020. So, that was the difficult period of time when many of you were in confinement and had to close campuses. The survey targeted institutional leadership and we had quite a good turnout in that we had close to 370 responses from different types of institutions and also from across the European high education area. So, all 48 countries were involved. We have conducted a similar study already in 2014. So, this allows us then to have some longitudinal data and we also asked quite similar questions in our regular trends reports. This is a pre-presentation, so to say, because the report is not yet published. We hope to get it out by the end of the month or probably more likely in December. And all this takes place under the Erasmus project, DGHE funded by Erasmus, a three-year project which tries to encourage institutions to self-reflect on their digital strategies. So, I start here with the results and I think the idea is that I present that and then we have a very knowledgeable and experienced panel here so that we can ponder a bit upon the data and see what is the situation in the specific higher education systems and institutions in Europe. But there's also an opportunity for you to ask questions or to comment in the chat and I think Sandra will get us then some of the questions. So, to start with different provision modes, what we found was 75% are using blended learning throughout the institution or in some faculties. That might sound impressive, take into consideration that is before the COVID crisis. In some countries it's even 100% Austria, Belgium, Finland, I don't read them at all. So that might sound impressive, but it's actually not much more than we had already in 2014. So we don't see a big increase here. Admittedly in 2014 it was already quite high. So we don't really know how to explain that, but something that we can see very clearly is that compared to 2014 it is much more used throughout the institution. So there has been a considerable mainstreaming compared to 2014 where more institutions actually answered that they use it only in some faculties or only through specific projects. So that's some blended learning. Asked then specifically about online degree programs, a bit the same story. We had about the same number, about one third of institutions, which already said in 2014 that they offer online degree programs. If we ask them then in detail how much that is used throughout the institution, we found out that this is actually just a few. So we interpret this that institutions are still and will remain conventional universities where students usually come to campus. And that is confirmed by the fact that again before crisis 90% of institutions answered that they have most students on campus. So I think I stop here and yes. Yes, thank you Michael for this introduction into this slide. I think that it's very interesting numbers. I'm certain that if you do the survey now today, in relation to the code 19 the data would be rather different. But let me ask our representatives university representatives, how these numbers relate to their institutions. So maybe Irene, we can start it with you. I know that at Vitatus Magnus University, you are doing quite a number of things regarding the blended and the online. So what is the relation with your data to this in the slide. So we are not one of the biggest universities in Europe, but we are the second university in the country in terms of the numbers of students and staff. So we have now more or less 10,000 students. And I can tell you that all absolutely all programs and courses are online. But the question is, of course, always to what extent and what kind of intensity they are online in contacting and contacting interacting with the teacher and with the students. And in terms of accessibility of learning material, lectures, records, tasks, assignments and assessments. So definitely this survey very clearly also corresponds with our case, I would say that the majority of programs are prepared in a blended way. But the intensity before COVID and the percentage actually we do measure our courses to what kind of percentage it is possible to implement it in a blended model completely online. It differs. And yes, the target actually was acceptance, mainstreaming, but also pathological innovations. But finally, before COVID-19 and spring 20, we have several, only several programs adapted for online degrees. And those were usually targeting at lifelong learners or people who re-enter higher education. And I think we will speak about it a little bit later. But I must confess that we have not reached mainstreaming nor acceptance to large extent. But of course, spring case was different. And now we are talking about such aspects as satisfaction requirements. So we immediately move to experience to re-analyze and re-address it to see where we are and whether we moved with everything or just used video conferencing and other means to reach our students. Thank you. Thank you, Irina. Let's hear one more opinion, Philipp. What do you think did your universities before the pandemic actually had the mainstream of blended learning or it was already 100 percent? Sorry, we cannot hear you. Yeah, okay. It's okay. No. In fact, if you speak about blended learning as teaching learning using LMS platform, learning management system platform, like Moodle, for instance, or Blackboard, it's more than 20 years that the University of Brussels has developed this and it's now six years that it's legally mandatory for publicly funded higher education institution in Belgium, French part of Belgium. So since six years, all institutions are obliged to give access to all their students to online teaching resources on a learning management system, like syllabus notes, assignments, references, podcasts and so on. So each course of our programs receives yearly automatically a dedicated intranet space on the LMS with an access given to teaching staff, of course, but also the student enrolled for the course. So with respect to this, 100 percent of our course are on the platform. But as Irina said, the intensity of use of this platform is very different from one course to the other one. We also added recently during the last year some additional numerical tools like WCLAB. It's a performance instantaneous online voting system and now during the crisis of COVID teams and stream. So video conferencing and video recording management systems for the complete institution. But as we say, if blended teaching and learning is referring to teaching on site and online, it's not in fact an institutional goal. But if it contributes to address the objectives and the goals of some courses or program, it will be supported by the university and it's in line with our institutional charter for learning and teaching that we adopted in 2012 in order to give some long term goals for improvement of enhancement of teaching and learning of our university. But I wanted to say that we are a comprehensive university and we have a large part of our programs including laboratory practice, on-field training, training by simulation, learning by projects, internship and so on. And this is very hard to organize just online. So it means that at this time it's still considered as activities, learning and teaching activities that will remain on long term with the physical presence of the students on site, on the field, in the internship locations. So it means that where online can be introduced and is something interesting for reaching the goals of the course and reaching a better quality of learning, it will be supported. But we still believe that on-site experience is often something very important. And what I just want to say that we don't have any online degree, complete degree in our programs. It means in the programs subsidized by the public funding because it's not legally authorized at the moment. The only activity that has been developed by our institution is developing some MOOCs. What I want to say for instance for my university represent 10 to 15 courses and we have 3,000 to 4,000 courses in our program. So MOOC is very little part of our teaching activities. Thank you, Philippe. I thought maybe to pass to another slide before giving the floor to Marta, but I cannot stay without asking her to share. Because University of Rijeka has online degree program and it's one of the few in Croatia. So definitely within this 38% and this was before the COVID pandemic. How was it different to prepare and how teachers and students reacted to this, Marta? Yes, thank you, Sandra. Actually, we had two online degree programs, master's programs. And we can see now that COVID crisis stimulated other faculties also. We have now two or three more in preparation for accreditation. Well, the programs well received and our university has some 14-15 years of blended learning implementation into our study programs. But as Michael nicely presented, we had kind of reached a plateau where we had some 45% of our courses offered through the blended learning. And we couldn't get this percentage higher, maybe without making it mandatory. And we can see now that this situation produced a completely different setup. And since we all needed to go online overnight, we prepared also for this academic year for all the courses to have this situation. As Philipp also said, for all course teachers to have mandatory, even at least basic materials presented on our LMS. It's not our LMS, I have to say. We have this national support. Sandra comes from the institution that provides national support in Croatia for blended learning. So this is very valuable resource that we are using in Croatia by having all these logistics and infrastructure provided centrally. Thank you, Marta. So for the moment I will stop. Thank you. Before we are moving to the next slide, we have one question, maybe which I think is important to answer before going. We have a question from Fortunato Sorrentino who is asking, can you be precise about what you mean by blended? Normally this means part in the present part online. So as you did the survey, I leave this question to you. Yeah, no, absolutely. No, we cannot be precise. I think we are as blurred as anybody else who talks about blended learning. But I make here the promise that for our next survey we will become more precise. So I think it's no longer useful to ask the question about blended learning. And I think that was the core of his question. We have been using that for a while, but it could mean all kinds of things from people having a very, from institutions having a very elaborated digital learning ecosystem. And others just recording lectures and putting them on the website. So we need to get more differentiated there. Thank you. So let's move on. Yeah, I think that's actually the question is actually a nice transition to the next slide, which is about curriculum and digital skills. And I start with curriculum. And again, we don't have good data on this. But I mean, just taking up what has been asked and also what Irina, Philippe and Marta presented is. I think a question is really when you use digitally enhanced learning, be it online or be it blended, how transformative is this actually? I mean, how much has this Marta referred to the COVID crisis, but Philippe and Irina said already it happened already before the COVID crisis. How transformative has this already been? Or is this just like we teach now online is just another medium, but it's actually the same way of teaching. So how would you really see the gains, I would say? So that would be the first question, the disruption, the gains, what is changing there? Then the second question is about the digital skills. And there we have actually some good data. And as you can see here, it's basically addressed at most institutions. 94% have it specifically to the discipline or the study field. 91% have generic digital literacy, data literacy and safety and ethics is a little bit lower, but it's widespread out. However, if you ask institutions, they say it's not offered to all students or only on specific study programs or it's a voluntary offer. So it's not really, I would say, fully mainstreamed yet. And we don't know really why that is. Is it because the need is so different or has there not enough attention being paid? And is that probably the step for the next round to make that much more mainstreamed and embedded really into the curricula? So two questions. One is how disruptive has been the impact also before the COVID of digitally enhanced learning on the curriculum? And then the second one, how do you see the presence and future of digital skills? Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Maybe, Irina, you can start with this curricula disruption. How often and in what way did you change the curricula in your university regarding the implementation of digital part? I think the last semester was very illustrative. I would compare actually the disruption towards education curricula. I would compare the same phenomenon with the understanding of how globalization is perceived by societies. Before spring 2020, we heard many important and interesting discussions about how we should be opened towards global issues, global problems in our small and local societies. At the same time, we thought and we heard that we should also improve and modernize higher education curricula. But maybe due to our nature, we would always try it step by step, thoughtfully, collaboratively, maybe not always collaboratively, but always thoughtfully and would introduce very small segments of digitalization, modernization, step by step. And of course, we are always overloaded with other things as professionals, as practitioners. But there was a small, quite small community of those who would promote digitalizations because it improves pedagogy, let's say, because it facilitates uptake of networking and collaboration in one another way. And suddenly this disruption came. We all became citizens of the global world because we all were faced with the same challenges of pandemics and we all became faced with the same challenges in higher education and mainly the need to change curricula. I think European University Association also called Insurance Agency Network in Europe clearly after several surveys identified two main challenge areas that curriculum needs to meet. Assessment, new types of assessment and new modes of formative assessment in our practices and engagement of students. I think now we are talking not only about moving our lectures online, but the need to change curriculum, to rethink student engagement and to rethink assessment of learning outcomes within curriculum, our priorities. I'm very happy about it. At the same time as said that we are so short of time for this, but I think this is the main disruption and I believe that it is coming with a very progressive and positive changes in pedagogies. Thank you. I will just be adding something to your comment because I know in Croatia that when we had programs which went to a recreditation regarding their curricula, mostly institutions try to add some part of the digital in a way, but mostly in a blended way as addition to the classroom teaching in order to improve the quality of teaching. This was not big steps, but these were steps taken before the pandemic. Now I have teachers who had to move mostly fully online and who are asking how to actually work on a pedagogical part and now realizing that they need to change the curricula. Because the curricula which was previously developed was developed for the face-to-face teaching and not for online teaching and it has now become clear that new recreditation and new curricula should be developed. So maybe it wasn't so much before, but now I think that the change of curricula will start much more in order to enable teachers to provide quality teaching and learning with curricula which was prepared for the online teaching and learning. Okay, let's see the second part or regarding the literacy and the skill and I think the Philip you are just right the person to ask you this question because you were director of teaching and learning center. So how was issues related to the teachers skills at the institution rearranged? Was it compulsory or not and if which trainings did you provide or insured for teachers? Yes, in fact, in fact, something I wanted to say that this is an ongoing process. It's a long-term ongoing process. As I said to you, we introduced our first learning management system 20 years ago. Our libraries, I also directed the libraries during a part of my career, also adopted massively during the same 20 years period, the numeric support for database periodics up to 100% of periodics in some disciplines books. Online process for communication are becoming universal in the institution. So it means that I really have the feeling that the COVID crisis just accelerated the process more than created the process. And it has been really adopted or supported by the learning and teaching center staff in order to help stakeholders to adapt themselves to the situation where the use of these tools increased massively during a very short period, during a weekend period. In fact, during the time they decide the lockdown and at the time we start to work online for teaching and learning activities in March. So I think the new normal situation will be an opportunity to think about the introduction of online tools, digital tools and knowing more than we had before the pros and the cons of the tools. Before there was a position of some teachers, some teaching staff or responsible of programs that online was not adapted to their programs. No, they have some experience, they develop experience, they just observe new tools and some are curious to continue to use some of these tools in order to improve as it has been said by Irina, improve the quality of the learning experience of the students. This is the goal. In fact, the goal is not improving the teaching activity, the goal is improving the learning quality of our students. So among the new opportunities, I would just say for instance that before this time, having a student abroad during one of his international exchange program like Erasmus program was very difficult when he had to follow a mandatory course at the university. This becomes possible. Having a teaching assistant attending conference abroad during a part of the year where he has teaching duties was impossible and now it becomes possible. You can imagine that teaching assistant is given his lecture or his course when being abroad through numerical tools that we experienced. So things are changing and skills are improving. I always say that the numerical tools have been just tools, it's not a goal. But if it can help, even as I said before in one of my course, it can help the digital students, can help the students come back to the classroom. Some don't come back, do not come to the classroom in the usual way of teaching. Now with these new tools, maybe they will be interested to come into the classroom and receive the added value of the teacher, which is not just lecturing and giving theory, but discussing with them about the program. So that would be my answer to your question. Okay, thank you. And I want to ask Marta as well the same question because I know she established the Learning Center at the University of Rijeka and there she provided some trainings for teachers in digital skills. And the situation she, you have the Marta before the COVID and how it changed after the COVID started because yours also had organized quite a number of teacher trainings during the COVID so that they are unable to use digital technologies. Yeah, thank you. Well, I think we all have to agree that this COVID crisis produced an irreversible change in higher education. And as any, okay, we have the freeze on you. Okay, we are losing you a little bit. A new era of higher education and new set of tools that we have to develop to support it. In these terms, this change has to focus first on the academic continuous professional development in terms of not only acquiring digital skills, but also new pedagogies. And we were always stressing this, this part of pedagogy in our educational support for the teachers. We had a certain set of educated teachers also before but now after the COVID crisis in the springtime, we offered some emergency education for teachers during the summer. And I have to say that we had more than 600 educations finished by our academics during July and August. So it was kind of motivation that we could not see before this situation. This was really how would I say, yes, promising for the future. And we think that this year we kind of planned to, for the moment to set up tools, set the whole framework for quality assurance tools to monitor what's happening in this academic year to get the most out of the suggestions that our academics provided in this situation. And that was use of peer collaboration, helping each other, but also in the same time to have this top-down level of university management, and taking care of continuous professional development of teachers in terms of enhancing their teaching competencies in digital surrounding. Thank you. Going back to you, Michael, I just would like to ask our participants if they would like to share in chat their experience regarding the topic which we present here. We would like to hear from them if they would like to share their experience as well with the questions. So Michael, I'm going back to you now. Yeah, that's good. And I probably just to confirm what Marta just had said. I mean, I don't have that on my slides, but peer collaboration, peer exchange turns out indeed almost like a remedy to quite a few of the problems that you have. And it's also often the answer for staff development at institutions and also for the transformation work that has to be done just to be clear. I mean, the data that I produce here, the percentages are actually about whether this is offered to students. So has that been included into the curriculum? We see at some institutions that extra courses offered to I think what is behind it that we cannot assume that all students are really prepared to deal with all these digital issues. I mean, there's the frequently quoted assumption that they were born digital natives, but we know that this doesn't really say much. And the question is really, is that something that you consider now when you design curricula or when you offer your course? I mean, it may have to do with the disciplinary skills that you need for your particular field. I think that's probably an obvious one. But there are also more general issues, as I have done detailed here like digital literacy, safety and also the ethics issue, which we know, which we are usually pointed to when things go wrong, you know, when you have kind of mobbing or stalking or all kinds of plagiarism and so just the question, have you found a way on how to address that at your institution or is that just done by everybody almost automatically and it's not a problem? Okay, so are we going to move now to the next slide? Good. Well, this is about quality assurance and I think that was one of the slides that surprised us a little bit. So what you can see here in the pie chart is the response that we got to internal QA. And as you can see, it's about, it's a bit more than half of the institutions which have internal QA in place, which covers also digital provision or digitally enhanced provision. That's good in that it is 22% more than it was in 2014. So clearly an increase. It's not so good in that it raises the question, what are the other half of the institutions do? I mean, do they provide digitally enhanced learning and this is not quality assured? So I think that's my first question here. I come later on to the external QA, but probably we start with this. Have you any views on that from your systems, from your institutions? Yeah, okay. Maybe, Irina, we could start with you, but if we have some examples from their institutions, we would like to see them in a chat as well. So maybe, Irina, you could start here. Yes, I think the question that higher education institutions might continue to have is what is the difference between the existing quality assurance strategies and the ones that would address digitalization or technology enhanced learning integration into an organization. And that was the question that we also addressed for many years. In Lithuania, a quality assurance agency, the Center for Higher Education Institute called the assessment, even had the national project many years ago, maybe 15 years ago, to see if existing, so this is sorry, Michael, four external things, but still, if existing standards and guidelines need to be updated with something that is required by distance education, and then the addressed institutions and institutions had to review existing quality assurance strategies. And actually, I think it needs some time to achieve the level when you can make a decision with confidence that, yes, there are things that are different. As an example, if we go through the activity areas of higher education institutions that are related to this studies, we have the designing and developing of programs. Programs consist of courses. Courses are visible in a completely different way in virtual learning environments and digital spaces as they are in the audiences. If we go on the course level, we only through practice and experience see that they have different ways of communication. First of all, communication on what is expected from students. Teachers usually explain it in the audience, but when we move to digital spaces, we need immediately to provide additional information for students. On management of the learning material and even learning design assignments, assessment strategies, they need to be presented in a completely different ways, and we need some kind of standard or rules or regulations to be communicated internally. So I think it needs time. And now I prognose my hypothesis is that this need will rise. Now we refer to two possibilities. One to use benchmarking models or frameworks and tools existing for technology-enhanced learning integration into organization. Another way would be to see where we are at the moment and what we need to achieve and to try to find our own way. So I think the reason behind it is the fact that we need a discussion and we need to identify the items that differ from regular practices when we change our curriculum and our teaching and learning practices in higher education institutions. And I know that some questions were left behind that Michael asked related to the ethics and safety and other things within institutions. I think these go through the same way. We naturally accept under the code of ethics that we cannot do something that is not appropriate. And when we start discussing, for example, academic integrity in our days or ethics online, we still have a discussion whether regular regulations and rules and agreements satisfy the new practice or not. So I think those who decided that not, they designed internal strategies and others will do it in the future. Thank you. Thank you, Irina. Maybe Michael, we can move to the second question here in your slide you planned. Yes, and yeah, and thanks for probably I share my explanation here. I think Irina is right. It takes obviously time to take it up. Nevertheless, give also that QA regimes are usually quite strict. We were just wondering how do you get away with that in the current situation. One explanation that we actually had is that the use at individual institutions of digitally enhanced learning is not so wide that one has the feeling that it needs extra QA. I mean, this is what we had seen already in 2014. It was rather fragmented, you could say. So you get away with that. But one explanation is also that in some systems, you might not be formally allowed to use blended or online learning. And we know that a bit anecdotally that, for example, student learning only counts that came up now also in the COVID crisis. It's only possible when students are on campus, so they are not allowed to do distance learning, which would also prevent you to use some of the benefits that blended learning or the possibilities that blended learning brings. And I think we have an indication here in when we asked institutions about what they see as main obstacles for digitally learning and teaching. As you can see, it's only 11% that see external QA in EHE average, so in European average as an obstacle. But then in individual countries, and I just picked up here too, it's actually much more. We have Albania and Spain here, Spain with one third and Albania at 60%. So I think that that gives an indication that there is a problem at the systems level with the external QA. We also know that from the discussions that we had in the Bologna follow up group on digitally enhanced learning, where some countries, in particular, but not only in Eastern Europe, were a bit concerned that if we basically recognize it as learning and teaching with just other means and open the door to it, that this would result into challenges regarding QA and also fraud. And I just wanted to point you here to a recent statement that the E4 group, so the organizations of the universities, my organization, the colleges, the quality assurance agencies and the European students has done, where they make clear that the European standards and guidelines that Irina had also mentioned also extend to digitally enhanced learning. They just have to be, and this is what Irina said, they have to be properly applied and you have to think what that actually means done. So any comments on this? Yes, maybe Marta or Philippe would like to comment on this. Maybe we can proceed. Okay. Maybe just wanted to say one word about external QA and any QA process in university. I don't know if it's universal, but it's really common in our country that QA process is sometimes considered or often considered by academics as an additional administrative task to a daily already heavy agenda. And so it's not really popular among the academics and it's strange because in fact, if you think about it, the QA process are based on a collection of evidence and the goal is to improve the quality of the teaching and the learning experience of our teachers and students. So it means the way to organize QA is very similar to what the way we organize research activity. So the reason why academics are skeptical with respect to QA for me is often that the data collected for QA process are not easily accessible for the learning teaching stakeholders just for the administration of the university. And therefore, these data are not recognized in general as high value information for designing new courses or curricula or implementing new initiative in learning teaching. So we have to think about the accessibility of this data and of all data that could help people to improve the quality of learning and teaching, including the digitalization dimension of course. Yeah. Okay, thank you. And Michael, we have one question. I think we can put it related to this slide here in Q&A. Asking from Andrea, she says, do you think that online exams will be enough to evaluate the students? I think that it is in relation to moving fully online within the COVID crisis. So maybe if some of the panelists would like to answer this question, do we have some volunteers here? What was the question? I didn't understand it. Question, is online exams enough to evaluate the students? Different type of evaluation of the students online, you can ask a student to produce something, a written document that I put online or a portfolio, as was discussed yesterday during the meeting, or it could be also oral exams online. It's very different to organize this kind of exams and to organize multiple choice exams as has been organized in some of our large classrooms last year. So I think this online is too short. Some kind of online assessment can be very, very informative and very aligned to the high level objectives that we have for some teaching activities. But some of them are really questionable. So let's just say that most of the online exams are not multiple choice exams. And this has been discussed, of course, in the institutions. Yeah, definitely. And there's also formative evaluation of the student and definitely the online exam can be an essay, for example. So it's also different. So yes, there are different choices on that. So Michael, maybe we can move on to the next slide. Just to comment from our side, what we saw is that you can of course have bad online exams, but you can have all too bad exams on campus. And I think also just to support what Philip said about QA in general, I think it still has this bad reputation in a way. And as UA, we have been promoting quality assurance culture for many years and indeed linking it closer to the enhancement of learning and teaching. I think that's really a good opportunity to bring it forward. Good. I may add just a small comment because this online student assessment is really a hot topic. And everybody's asking what to do with this online assessment. I really think that this crisis is something that will promote new quality in student assessment and some improvement in assessment strategies all over our universities. Because on-site fraud is also happening, but teachers are fooling themselves that this does not happen. And suddenly they're furious about this online assessment as this will be a fraud. So I really think and going on with the trends, some trends in higher education towards no assessment at all, meaning no this normative assessment by tests and so on, that we will achieve a new quality in assessment strategies and move more towards this as under-pointed formative assessment, personal student achievements assessments and so on and so on. So I hope this is really a positive change that will bring us to a new level in quality. I think that summarizes nicely, Marta, probably one last point on this, both for the assessment and for the learning. One factor that comes of course in is that the conditions that students are facing off campus come much more to play. So when you have them on campus, you have them all in the same situation. And as we have seen also for the learning itself, that's a different thing. So I think we all learned a lot about how students actually learn outside of the university where the good part of the learning takes place in these days and in what situation that actually takes place. Okay, I'm, oops, sorry, that was one too many. Yeah, I'm moving on more to the things that can actually be done or enhanced through digital and enhanced learning and teaching, lifelong learning and also social inclusion. I think that was really interesting in this round. We found this much more emphasized than we saw it in 2014. An explanation is that institutions have become more aware of what they can actually do with it. So you can see that 48% almost half say that digitalization has contributed to major transformation in widening access about the same numbers as a way to reach out to new learner groups. Philip mentioned already MOOCs. We also asked them in 2014 about MOOCs, but in 2014, this reaching out to new learner groups was there but not so prominent. So this has really gained an importance for institutions here. And then also something that is very interesting that we know that already for some years that there's a growing demand that most institutions see for short courses, so not degree courses that are provided in blended mood. This is what 65% see, but also online 53%, but also 44% just on campus, so in a conventional course. So just as a compliment, probably partly also as a replacement to the degree programs that are traditionally offered by institutions. 65% confirm that they target mainly match mature and adult students. And then you can see also that it has really become a digital digitalization has really become a priority also for generally for enhancing social inclusion, lifelong learning and so interesting developments. We are asking us where that comes from. Is it that digital brings all these opportunities along? Or is it not also because institutions are much more under pressure to respond to changing economic demographic and also social conditions. And it is also much more inclusion and lifelong learning are also much more emphasized at policy levels. Thank you, Michael. So we see that percentage are interesting definitely. And that when more and more university institutions are widening access for digitalization and finding it as a strategic development priority, whether it is for competitive things, you know, like to be present in the international area. To get the international students, whether to enable the accessibility to all the students in their country as well. So I'm asking the volunteers who would like to comment on these percentages in the slides. So let me see. I can start with the examples from my country and my university. In Lido Das Marmus University, we have two environments, digital environments, one for formal degree programs and other for non formal open and flexible learning opportunities. The first big surprise came maybe five years ago. We have these two environments for more than 10 years now. But the first surprise was five years ago when we were preparing the report for director and we received statistics from formal degree program environment that our community members, teachers and students login to their curriculum to their courses, which are not online courses, but are blended only blended and in majority of cases to very small intensity that they log into their courses from more than 10 countries in the world through the semester, which demonstrated that they have very, very big scope for mobility. And then we started questioning our academic community about that and that was the fact because we had numbers from international department and other things. And we saw that, well, students access and we started even introducing requirements for our teachers to leave the records, the slides, the theoretical references that they use in the traditional conventional classroom online for those who were not able to be present in in our face to face contact classes. The second very positive surprise was that actually the vast majority of lifelong learners from the country and from diaspora, which is in the outreach and reaches until the United States and Australia, they joined non formal and short course possibilities through non formal portal, which is called Open Studies. And the reason for that is that they did not feel prepared for higher education to come back to to rejoin formal studies in higher education, but all the majority of programs they offered non formal courses in the in the Open Studies way. So the society members, our diaspora members could start some courses from formal curricula and then to have them recognized in the formal curricula if national entry requirements for higher education allowed. And now we are in a very hard discussion with universities in the country that we sometimes overestimate entrance requirements where open universities have low or none of the entry requirements, but very high requirements for the graduation. And we have the opposite way. So what I wanted to change is that I completely I'm completely ready to illustrate this percentage with the with the national perspective and institutional perspective. And yes, our students changed, they are mobile, they, they are working, they are employed in the majority of cases. So we have a different economic situation, social situation now. And without digitalization, we would cut off a lot of possibilities indeed. Thank you, Marta. Would Philip Marta, would you think Marina Marta, would you like to comment and then Philip? Maybe I can present just shortly the framework for lifelong learning that we have at our university and what the situation produced with this. Well, some 10 years ago we started to credit lifelong learning programs offered mostly to the community to our environment from the university. But more and more we use this track to offer also to our students some interesting programs. And then we developed this recognition of prior learning frameworks through which the students can apply for these programs to be recognized within their study programs if it matches their curriculum learning outcomes. So, more and more, all these programs are now are transferring to blended or completely online. And I think that this could be a good starting point to develop so called micro credentials in the future that are also a hot topic at the European level at the moment. Okay, thank you, Marta and Philip. Would you like to add something to this topic? Not really on this topic because in fact the long life learning process or policies very dependent on the faculties in our university because it's not funded. So it's difficult to give a global picture. Okay, thank you. So, Michael, we have no questions on this from the audience so we can move on. Yeah, I think I just take one more point on this also because Marta mentioned, I mean, Philip gave one of the indications I think where it is also difficult to talk about lifelong learning because it's so differently organized within institutions and is often also not not really visible often as often as one of the provisions that the university offers. We know that also from our data that in many institutions on some systems, it's really fenced off from the regular provision through different QA regimes different funding rules, sometimes also taught by different stuff than the regular university stuff. Just to pick up on what Marta said about the micro credentials. I mean the growing demand here for short courses that's a very, that's a very, I would say diverse mix, I think that institutions have there in place. Our impression is some of it exists already for a long, long time. It has different purposes as it has also been described. It could be for students, it could be for teachers, a lot for stuff development inside of the university. But indeed, some of this also addresses learners from outside of the university. And why we have no, not not the feeling that this puts in question the traditional degree approach, which is still I think what most students who graduate from school and go to university are after. We can clearly see that this could be a potentially very important way of providing lifelong learning or additional for those already in the workforce, or also for those who are studying and need an extra shot on a particular skill or discipline. So I'm just asking because Marta mentioned it's very, it's very high on the policy political agenda at the European level at the moment. The European Commission has an expert group on this. The commissioner has emphasized it on several occasions. And it's also a key priority at some national levels we know about emerging national platforms. There's also been a European platform announced in last but not least, it's also something that is emphasized in the framework of the European University Alliances, which many of them try to set up micro credentials provision. Have you any views on that? Has there been a discussion at your institutions? Would that be a strategy or is this something that you're looking into? You're asking me. One of you, one of you for If not, we can just at the audience as well. If somebody has a Our university is a part of one of the European alliances, it's youth alliance and we are trying to develop the framework for micro credentials, but we are only at the starting point. Okay. Yeah. Good. Thanks. Good. Good. Then I I can just add that tomorrow we will have session on micro credentials. Okay. My job. This topic can tomorrow follow more about that. Yeah. Let's move to another theme. Internationalization and mobility. And then we got a rather positive feedback from the institutions. I don't show that here, but basically we get confirmation that digitally enhanced learning and teaching is very useful in the international context for exchange and collaboration with international partners, but also asked about the prospects five years ahead. You can see here most of the institutions confirm this to be one of their development priorities. So 86% see it as a means to enhance outreach and learning provision for international students and about the same number for collaboration with other higher education institutions internationally. And there are also 77% who see this as a replacement for physical mobility with virtual mobility and online meetings. Any views from your institutions? Are there any big initiatives planned? I mean, it must be particularly interesting now also in the COVID situation because we can't have much physical mobility at the moment. Yes. I'm opening the floor to maybe Irina, Philippe, would you like to share something? Yes. I'm very positive about virtual mobility and with the experience that we had in several consultions in the past. We worked with the projects on virtual mobility since 2009 and did research and some dissertations. One of the outstanding initiatives in Europe and I think with the recent focus and possibilities provided for higher education institutions, it is already, I'm confident about saying that it is already a key to the major impact. How? First of all, in offer in the development of possibilities and outreach and learning provisions for international students, yes, but at the same time, revisiting courses and programs that are offered for a virtual exchange with the purpose of student collaboration through online studies, through academic and cultural exchange online on certain topics in certain programs. It has impact upon curriculum improvement, upon teacher and learner competence and skills improvement, intercultural competencies, linguistic skills, digital competencies. So actually the impact is already measured and I believe it will be measured again, but it has very, very great potential. I would only mention one restriction that people usually want to stay with the blended mode. And we hope that we will be able to implement blended mode that it will not replace physical mobility, but will only enhance it. As for example, one of the positive again impact is that virtual mobility might prepare some students for physical mobility in advance, getting them possibilities to see how studies are organized in different cultural and academic settings. Just one question, Irina, when you refer to that and the benefits that it has, do you draw that from actual ongoing collaboration and exchanges that you have or is that something that is more envisaged and in the planning? We did research on that. I think through three consortia we have the same questionnaires and the same research instruments that we applied to three different contexts. Teacher virtual mobility, student virtual mobility and combined virtual mobility. Virtual mobility when students are hosted virtually and then send different scenarios. And last year we also shared the same instruments with the German at Resident Technical University, I think researchers, so they again reconformed some data came from them. I believe that a lot of cases of virtual mobility experiences were restricted due to administrative costs in the past, but now when international offices in universities supported with the funding for virtual mobility, I think this problem is solved. And that's why I'm very, very happy about it. So the main obstacle now is removed for mainstreaming of these possibilities. I will not repeat what Irina said because I fully agree with this. I just want to say that even if Belgium is a little country, you drive a car during a bit more than one hour and you are outside the country. Even if this is the situation of our country, I would say that digital activity has really some positive impact on collaboration, not only international, but also national, regional and even intra institutional in the university itself. It's not new degrees co-organized by different institutions, different faculties already exist before COVID, but one of the major obstacles was the logistic management of this collaboration. That is much more easier to support that standard on program. So it's clear to me that digital and development of online tools are an opportunity to make possibly life as students easier in these co-organized programs and also make life of the staff, academic as well as administrative staff easier. So it doesn't mean, as Irina said, that this collaboration has to remain strictly virtual online because experience of sharing local activity remain a great source of enrichment for the students, the teachers, but some heavy constraints appear today to be possibly lighter than was expected before. So for me, virtual mobility, international or even national, can be further developed, but it will hardly compete the experience of an immersion in a different environment with different cultural language or tradition. On-site activity remain a unique experience for students, I think, and even for the staff. So virtual mobility can be a new normal of inter-university collaborations and I really like the idea that virtual mobility could prepare to actual mobility. Thank you. Thank you. I think there is much more when we're talking about virtual mobility. Does it mean just one course? Does it mean just one lecture? How to move the points get from one institution to another? So there are lots of issues here to be discussed. Just let me remind you that we have still seven minutes to go. So Michael, please choose the slides you would like to, that we discuss yet, when we have time. I think we have just one left. I just wanted to, one question to you all. Do you see now in the current COVID situation, do you see that Erasmus student mobility is transferred to virtual? Does that take place, I mean, or is that more exceptional? Or maybe you don't know. For us it's exceptional. The goal is still to remain actual mobility. And if it's not occurring, it's cancelled most of the time. I can say we have prepared for this academic year within our European Alliance, virtual mobility year. And in our university, we financially supported and we are supporting now about 30 teachers to develop complete online courses with innovative strategies for assessment because assessment should also be done through this. And within the Alliance, we are having at the moment, hundreds students in virtual mobility, and we are planning to have another hundred in the summer semester. Of course, this will be a starting point. We have limited this 200 students in order to be able to check for all the aspects or issues that might come up. But we are preparing an Erasmus multilateral agreement between our Alliance institutions to be able to promote both physical, virtual and combined mobility. Thanks. That's interesting to learn. This is one shining example from Croatia. We are very happy about that. Yeah, rightly so. Good. Okay. This can be my last slide. I have one more on COVID-19 impact, but we discussed already quite a bit on that. I'm sorry. No, it's not. This is the one on strategy. I forgot about that. Maybe we just do that very briefly. So in a nutshell, the results are there's much more strategies in place. Our feeling is also compared to 2014, the strategies have become much more meaningful and useful within the institutions. We can see generally a trend that institutions kind of develop centralized or shared responsibilities for digital learning, which is in sharp contrast to what we saw in 2014, where it was left often to some faculties, even to some individual staff at institutions. So that's the one side. So I think universities really build strategies and structures for digital enhanced learning. And then what you can also see that involvement and staff and students is also widely used. And both strategy and staff plus staff development training that comes actually out as the three top enablers for digitally enhanced learning at institutions. So it's strategy, staff and student participation and staff development. And it's only number four is only major investments in equipment and infrastructure. So a strong emphasis on staff and strategy and structures. Any comments on that? Just to pick that up, as you can see, it's different as everything across Europe. When we look at the 12% of institutions which don't have strategies, you can see it's partly in southern and eastern Europe. And interestingly, Belgium is there. Now Philip will tell us that must be Flanders, but let's see. No, I will not say that it's just Flanders, but maybe. But I'm optimistic because we have to understand that strategy or QA process is often considered perceived in universities as an obstacle to academic freedom. And because it's introducing in the higher education institution, attitude and process coming from the business world where objectives, profit, efficiency, excellence are not always similar to the ones of a discussion world. Critical thinking, blue sky research and so on. So I think that successful pilot experience, which will be evidences for the academic world will make easier the adoption of such plans in the future adapted to the world of education. And it will improve during the next years. I'm quite sure evidence based on, you know, Michael, very important. Maybe we can ask Irina and Marta for their opinion and then conclude with this session. So Irina, would you like to comment on this topic as well? Well, if we conclude now, I would like to say that there were those institutions, professionals, networks who were discussing digitalization and technology enhanced learning for many years and found their own way. But today we have to rethink what we have. And also there are others joining in into the discussions. I think one of the most beautiful things would be if we have more possibilities to meet on national and international level for the open discussions and to revisit existing practices to take maybe good practices, but to see them in the new light. And I'm sure we would find the need to update many things to find new ways. I think very important investments already done in Europe exist. They are also not always visible. So revisiting them, bringing them to the new light and bringing very diverse opinions and discussions would be very helpful and important for all of us. So I think any occasion like this and others is important and they should not wait for long. I think they should start immediately and continue. Thank you very much, Irina and Marta. Yes, thinking now broadly as a wrap up of this discussion, I would point here to this phrase on the slide, transformative impact of digital learning or transformative impact of this COVID situation that taught us and made clear that digital education or applying of digital tools in education can have very, very numerous positive effects. And we should rely on this positive sides of digitally enhanced learning, but our strategies should focus on support of the academics and support of the students in order to ensure the environment in which the students can really acquire the skills needed for their future. And that is autonomous learning, that is self-organization, that is creativity, innovation and responsibility for personal development. So I think as we always pointed digital or digital tools are just the tools and we should focus our strategies towards this, what I just described. Nicely said Marta, I'm coming back to you, Michael, for the concluding words. I think that Marta summarized it so nicely and Irina as well, so nothing more to add to that, probably just to thank you because that was really useful also for me. Whenever you collect data, you think it gives you the answers, but you always find out it gives you the questions. So thank you for making the data speak. I think that's very good and I hope we can continue that. Thank you, Michael. Thank you all. I think it's very important to reflect on the data we have and give us the possibility to see what we can do better and which direction we should move more. So I'm very happy that we had this session. So thank you all. Thank you Irina, Marta, Philip and Michael. Recordings will be available later. So either in European or online and distance learning week is continuing till the Monday. So we have a few more sessions. Thank you for being with us today and see you this evening already. Bye. Bye everybody. Bye, thanks. Bye bye.